3.3 Using flex 3 in a flex 4 world

Table of contents

• Preface
  • General
  • Viewing tip
    • Figures
    • Listings
  • Supplemental material
• Preview
• Discussion and sample code
  • Download and use the free open-source Adobe Flex 3 SDK
  • Download and use the free FlashDevelop IDE
  • Download and use Flash Player 4 with the Flex 3 SDK
• Run the program
• Resources
• Miscellaneous

Preface

General

This lesson is part of a series of tutorial lessons dedicated to programming with Adobe Flex. The main purpose of this lesson is to supplement the earlierlesson titled The Default Application Container - Flex 3 and Flex 4 with more information about the Flash Builder 4 IDE as well as information about the FlashDevelop IDE.

Adobe released a new product named Flash Builder 4 in March of 2010 and immediately removed all, or at least most of the references to Flex Builder 3 from their website. Those references that were not removed were converted to references to Flash Builder 4. For example, the link (see Resources ) that previously opened an Adobe page for free downloading of Flex Builder 3 (for educational use) now opens a page for free downloading of Flash Builder 4 for educational use.

What is Flash Builder 4?

Flash Builder 4 is an apparently upgraded version of Flex Builder 3 with a new name. Flex Builder 3 was based on Flex version 3, while Flash Builder 4 isprimarily based on Flex version 4. However, Flash Builder 4 still supports Flex 3 in addition toFlex 4.

Regardless of how you choose to get there, the objective is to create swf files that can be executed in the Flash Player. Flash Builder 4 is only one ofseveral different ways to create applications that will run in the Flash Player.

The Flex 4 SDK and Flash Player 10

In conjunction with the release of Flash Builder 4, Adobe also released a new version (version 4) of the free open-source Flex SDK and a new version (version 10) of the Flash Player.

Flex Builder 3 was based on Flex 3 and required Flash Player 9 (or later) for execution of the swf files produced by compiling a Flex application.

Flash Builder 4 is primarily based on Flex 4 and requires Flash Player 10 (or later) for execution of the resulting swf files.

Flash Builder 4 supports Flex 3

Fortunately, Flash Builder 4 still supports Flex 3 for backward compatibility. I will show you later in this tutorial how to use Flash Builder 4with Flex 3.

Should you use Flex 4?

If you are using Flex to create web applications in a professional capacity, you should probably become familiar with Flex 4. It appears to provide some features thatare not available in Flex 3.

More powerful but also more complicated

Flex 4 is more powerful than Flex 3. However, Flex 4 is also more complicated than Flex 3. In some cases, Flex 4 also appears to create much larger swf filesthan Flex 3 for solutions to the same problems. Therefore, I suspect that some developers will not make an immediate switch to Flex 4, and that Flex 3 willcontinue to be commonly used for a few more years.