Getting Started with flex development

Before you start

As a new technology representative in the rich Internet application (RIA) era, Flex has grown at an unprecedented rate since Adobe set up its Open-source business in 2007. Many companies, including IBM, have joined the Flex-development camp. Many developers also can't restrain flex "temptation" and ready to engage in flex development. This article mainly describes the basic knowledge of flex development, mainly about the development environment, as well as the Simple Flex project creation, coding, debugging and deployment of the process and the basic knowledge of flex programming. Learning from this article, you will learn how to build Flex's basic development environment as well as the basics of development, debugging, and deployment. For you to further in-depth system of learning Flex lay a good foundation.

To learn this article, you need to have some experience with WEB programming and Eclipse FireFox usage.

Code samples and installation requirements

All the examples in this article are tested in the Windows XP SP3 system. You need a machine that runs the Windows XP system smoothly, and you need some tools to try the code in this article. All of these tools are available for free download (see Resources for reference):

Java SDK 1.5 or later

Tomcat 6.0 or later

Eclipse version 3.3 or later

Flex Builder 3.0 or later

FireFox2.0 or later

Install Configuration development environment

Then we can not wait to start! To build our development environment first, we recommend that readers use the same software version as this article in order to reduce problems caused by inconsistent environments:

Download and install the JDK (this article uses the version of Sun JDK 6);

Download and extract Eclipse (this article uses the version of the Eclipse Ganymede Java version, including the WTP plugin);

Download and install the Flex Builder Eclipse plug-in version (the Flex Builder version used in this article is 3.0.1);

Download and install Tomcat (this article is using version Tomcat6.0.18);

Download and install FireFox (due to compatibility issues with Flex3.0 and some plug-ins, this article uses FireFox2.0.0.17)

Everyone knows that the Flex code is compiled into a SWF file that runs in Flash Player and it is difficult to see some of the debugging information that the SWF file outputs at run time. So after installing the basic software, we need to install some of the FireFox plug-ins that will enable us to debug Flex:

Download and install the debug version of the FireFox Flash Player plug-in (the version used in this article is Flash Player10)

Open Firefox and search and install the Httpfox,flashtracer,cache Status three plugins on the Firefox extension site, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The FireFox plugin needed to develop debugging

Small Tips

After the debug version of Flash player and the Flashtracer plugin was completed, we found that Flashtracer does not normally display debug information that is output with the trace statement. To make it work, you also need to click the Flashtracer Settings button in Figure 1 to set the log file output path. and the output log file path must be C:\Documents and settings\administrator\application Data\Macromedia\Flash for Windows XP player\logs\ Flashlog.txt.