What is the relationship between flex, Flash, and air?

At first, I was confused by these concepts, especially the previous two articles.ArticleAfter Silverlight is different from flash, some people have doubts. One of them is that Silverlight should be compared with Flex, rather than flash.

I did not understand it until I read the official introduction of adobe. Originally, flex was just an open-source class library, which could be considered as a general component library. The result of flex compilation is a SWF file (similar to a binary executable file), which can be run in a flash player or air running environment (similar to OS ). Further, Flash Player runs in a browser, while air runs in a desktop environment (similar to hardware ). Flash and flex Builder are only creation tools used to generate SWF files. Flash directly generates the SWF file, and flex builder uses the flex class library-everyone knows that it is convenient to have a class library.

In fact, these concepts are collectively referred to as Flash Platform. Silverlight is also a general term. Of course, it will include the CLR and. NET Framework runtime environments, corresponding to Flash Player and air. The Control Toolkit of Silverlight corresponds to flex and belongs to the class library. Flash and flex builder correspond to Microsoft Expression blend and Visual Studio respectively, which are development tools.

Most of the time, when we talk about flash, we are not talking about the creation tool flash, but about SWF files or Flash Platform.

The introduction of Flex is as follows:

Flex Overview

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive, expressive Web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, batch tops, and operating systems. it provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. mxml, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive flex application debugger.

RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Adobe Flash Player software or on the desktop on Adobe AIR, the cross-operating system runtime. this enables flex applications to run consistently internal SS all major browsers and on the desktop. and using air, flex applications can now access local data and system resources on the desktop. both Flash Player and Adobe AIR are available as a free download on adobe.com.

You can accelerate application development with Adobe Flex builder 3 software, a highly productive, eclipse based development environment, and adobelive Cycle Data Services software, A set of advanced data services that can be used in flex development. both of these products are available for purchase.

Http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/overview/