What is Adobe Flex? Is it just Flash II?

Question

Question

Alright, I\'m confused by all the buzzwords and press release bingo going on.

• What is the relationship between flash and flex:
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Answer 1

Following up on this, I found a very useful article on the subject:

Adobe Flash and Flex—Which Makes the Most Sense for Your Project?

The Flash Integrated Development Environment (IDE), otherwise known in its current version as Flash CS3, is an ideal tool for developing character animation or linear animation projects. These are projects that require little coding and can be effectively implemented with the Flash IDE timeline.

In other words, Flash CS4 is very tightly bound to the timeline - good for linear sequences or animations. While one can add loops and interactivity in the form of jumping to new points on the timeline, it is limiting for projects which cannot easily be mapped out in terms of progression over time.

It is, in simplistic terms, an animation tool with very powerful interactive features - creating and composing new elements on the fly, and jumping around on the timeline allows one to create applications, and the Flash CS4 IDE makes this relatively easy, but it's not a great platform for application style software.

Flex was built as an answer to that - while it makes use of the same elements and exposes the code, it is not bound to a timeline, and has more in common with object oriented programming languages than animation languages.

The Flex Builder IDE includes both the programming IDE, as well as a GUI designer for quickly building interfaces, and a few other tools for developing applications that run on the flash player.