Flex 4 is a powerful framework that provides enterprise-level components for the Flash Player platform in a markup language format recognizable to anyone with HTML or XML development experience. The Flex Framework provides components for visual layout, visual effects, data grids, server communication, charts, and much more. To put a blunt point on it, the Flex Framework is massive, and any book attempting to cover the entire Framework in any depth will without question fail in some respect or another. With this in mind, we’ve made an attempt to cover the topics that most vex developers working with Flex 4. Along the way, we’ll illuminate how the Framework is structured, as well as helping developers familiar with earlier versions of Flex to start working with the new components and styling functionality in Flex 4. The official Flex documentation is quite good at explaining in depth how particular methods or classes behave, so our focus instead is on how to tackle common tasks within the Flex Framework, how to get different components to work together, and how Flex can partner with other technologies to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and more. With the help of Adobe AIR, for example, you can use the tools of Flex and the Flash Player to create deployable desktop applications. This complements the expansion of open source and commercial tools for Java, .NET, and PHP development, among others, making Flex a powerful solution for an ever-wider range of development needs and challenges.
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