Review and Win Flex Builder 3 Entries

[shunjie]

Hi Guys,

This is the official place to post your reviews. You can start a topic within this sub-forum. Your topic title can be like '<your name> flex builder 3 reviews', or just 'Flex Builder 3 review', etc. After posting, do remember to email your entry's link, your particular to adobe.sg@text100.com.sg , and cc it to contest@fug.sg

If you have any doubts, you can always IM me at shinchi[at]gmail.com on gtalk or residentevil_64[at]yahoo.com on MSN.

Regards,
Shunjie

[dannymurong]

I started off on Flex during beta 2 since October 2007. With all the ready-made components and a design view, it is so simple, literally drag-and-dropping to layout an interface for your application! As you switch from the design view to code view, the components are spelled out nicely in XML-format, also known as MXML where I can conveniently customise and set the values of the properties to get the required results.

Styling has been also made easy by CSS! I have even made the style of a button changed on the fly upon certain scenarios. With scale9 technique, you do not need to fear distortion of the image file you set as the skin for the components!

About a month later, I ventured into extending these ready-made components and thus stepping into a new learning curve. Flex has not only provided these already slick-looking and ease-to-use components, these Flex components has the ability to be extended in wondrous ways that you could imagine, giving developers and designers the great FLEXibity to stylise components.

At the end of 2 months time, I have successfully completed my very first AIR application, a kiosk application for a local telecommunication company. Cheers!

Rich Internet Applications in this modern and swift-paced technology internet realm have to be packaged with an outstanding outlook and stylish as a product, so that people, especially the digitally natives’ eyes will be captured and keen in. I certainly see Flex in the future as a leading platform having slick-looking presentation layer and strong background ActionScripting to drive interactions and usability!

[Andriy]

Flex Builder 3 Review
Flex Builder definitely played big part in my involvement in Flex applications development. It was my friend who recommended trying Flex and who promised me something very similar to what desktop developers used to have already for years but what web developers mostly weren’t aware of – Rapid Application Development (RAD). I downloaded trial version and in couple of minutes I created my very first Flex application without even knowing ActionScript3 or having any experience in developing for Flash platform before. And here goes very important feature of Flex Builder – it allows you develop fast and get results today and not after weeks of coding.
Frankly speaking, Flex Builder was not my first RAD tool for web development that I’d tried. Many of them were just OK, some of them like Flex Builder using Eclipse platform too, but good IDE is not enough. The combination of good IDE, programming language and framework – this is what turned me into Flex developer instantly.
As this is Flex Builder 3 review let’s focus on IDE and not on Flex Framework or ActionScript3. The goal of any development tool is to facilitate coding and make developer’s life easier. Flex Builder targets two categories of coders: first timers and experienced developers. First timers (like I was when I’d just downloaded Flex Builder) want make things quickly. Here just some of the features of Flex Builder that would help you start right away.
• Project creation wizards help to create a skeleton for your future application (it could be Flex, AIR or pure ActionScript3). It also takes care of server-side of your application mitigating configuration hurdles.
• Database application wizard will create an exemplar of Flex application accessing database server. It could be good starting point to someone who wants to do something similar (I would say 80% of functionality of enterprise applications is just modifying data in the database).
• Another very common task is accessing web services. Although you could use easily just Flex framework classes to call remote methods, “Import Web Service” wizard will be much appreciated when you face some advanced WSDLs that would require creating objects for data transfer.
• CSS editor helps even non-designers like me to create fancy looking application (Adobe is famous for its designers oriented products after all)
Not to mention visual designer, these and other tools and wizards would be useful for starting the project. But after you created your basic application, generated classes for accessing web services, designed view of your application with Visual Designer, you would need the tools that will make your life a lot happier: debugger, code refactoring, profiler, content assistant to name a few.
• Flex Builder 3 has excellent debugger that works relatively fast and give all information about execution context in any breakpoint. Not much changed from version 2, but this is the case when something hardly could be done to make it better.
• Code refactoring improved in third version but still it lacks features that many Java developers are used to have. ActionScript3 is much less verbose than Java and requires less typing but some refactoring techniques would save precious time. For example implementing interface with stub code. It’s already could be done for the case when you create a new class but not when you want to implement an interface after you created the class.
• Content assistant is a great tool for newcomers and experienced coders. I would put it as the feature number one for any IDE. One could add templates as an important addition to code assistant (like templates for comments, loops, try-catch blocks and so on) but in my opinion it’s not such required as in Java language, for example.
• Profiler is state of the art tool for advanced developers who need to polish their code to be perfect in terms of performance and memory consumption. It is a new addition to Flex Builder but I’ve already use it heavily for critical paths in my code to make sure that performance wouldn’t be a problem for my applications. And performance is very important when we are talking about Flash platform penetration to enterprise web applications market.
To summarize, Flex Builder 3 is the great tool for beginners and advanced developers. It has a key role in promoting Flex framework, AIR and Flash platform applications. The feature set is not richest comparing to mature IDEs for other platforms and languages but it has 80% of what you need for Flash/Flex development. At the moment it has no alternatives (I wouldn’t say that this is good) considering quality, feature set and price.

[magnuky]

Introduction
The internet was invented more than 12 years ago, which uses HTML to generate contents to the users. HTML was born to present information only. To allow two-way interactions, improvements were made to the technology. However, interaction which involves sending forms to servers and receiving processed information are too simple to excite people. AJAX tried to change that, pushing the old technology boundary to the maximum using javascripts as a work around to attain rich interactions. However, this approach wasn’t elegant, which raises cross-platforms compatibility issues, and stretches development time more than necessary to implement a relatively simple component. Adobe, instead of continuing to push the HTML platform horizontally, decided to build vertically towards a borderless space. Like any of the tall buildings in the world, the foundations need to be rock solid. Flex 1.5 and 2.0 did exactly that, laying the groundwork to incorporate all the rich features that we have always wanted. After two years of continual development, the web is now about to undergo a revolution.

What’s new in Flex 3.0
26 March 2008 marked the official launch of Flex 3.0, introducing many more features into the already-impressive rich internet application (RIA) platform.

Advanced Datagrid
The datagrid component in Flex 2.0 offers nothing more than a rigid tabular presentation of data. With the advanced datagrid, data can now be represented in both hierarchical and tabular view whereby each row can be expanded to show its sub-level rows. A summary row can also be added at the end of the table to show aggregated figures. For instance, consider a table representing an employee’s monthly salary, overtime charges, expenses and so forth. The total amount payable for the month can then be added as the last row in the table. In addition, new features such as, multiple columns sorting, multiple cell selection, merging several adjacent cells into one cell, are introduced. Developers who develop enterprise applications will appreciate these new features as they are often required to build complex reporting tools which present data in tabular forms.

CSS Visual Editor
CSS has become the de facto for applying styles to visual components on web pages or applications. Although CSS was already incorporated in Flex 2.0, the results of CSS definitions applied on components cannot be seen until runtime. Hence, very often, styling components using CSS involve many iterations of editing the CSS definitions and compiling the application to see the effects. To minimize such iterations, a CSS visual editor was included in Flex 3.0. Using the editor, we can see immediate results upon tweaking the components’ styling parameters.

Deep Linking
Deep linking is like the anchor (#) feature in HTML. In the context of flex applications, it allows users to navigate to a specific state of the application via URL. Why is this awesome? Consider an ecommerce website built using flex. If you want your friend to look at a specific product, you not only need to tell him/her the URL, but also how to navigate within the flex application to get to the specific page or state. With deep linking, giving only the URL will do the job. Thumbs up!

Memory/Performance Profiling
Managing memory allocation is important, every developer knows that. However, it is often unintentionally overlooked, and memory leakage is realized only upon the system crashes. The profiler agent tool introduced in Flex 3.0 aims to engage developer to actively take care of resources used in their applications. The profiler agent provides comprehensive real-time reporting such as the number of instances created for each class, and the amount memory consumed by each class. Performance snap-shots can also be saved so that we can compare the performance attributes taken at various point in time to detect any memory leak. Furthermore, there is an allocation trace panel where we can trace how many times a method is being called, and the cumulative memory it consumed. With such a comprehensive reporting tool, we can no longer give excuses to why memory allocation wasn’t managed properly.

Faster Compilation Time
Probably not many people feel the pain of compiling application in Flex 2.0. But for some of us who have build applications that embed large font sets and large size images would have felt the pain. Flex 3.0 uses an optimized MXML/COMPC/ASC compiler that implements the partial compilation method. This method allows caching during the compilation process, and only compiles those classes that have changed since the previous compilation, hence reducing the compilation time by orders of magnitude. Another thumbs up!

Code Refactoring
This is another “whao” feature for developers. Many times, we found ourselves in a situation where we need to rename some variables, methods, or classes. After renaming a variable, we need to change lines of codes that were referencing that variable. By changing the variable name via refactoring, all references will change as a result. Hence, it allows us to make changes quickly and consistently.

RIA alternative: Silverlight?
More than 90% of web browsers are already installed with the Adobe Flash player plug-in, hence providing an immediate market for content owners who wish to deploy their applications using Flex. On the other hand, at the time of writing, the market penetration of the Silverlight plug-in is less than 20%. No doubt, Microsoft will push its way to get a higher penetration for its Silverlight, either through Windows Autoupdate, or Internet Explorer updates. But it cannot force developers to develop their contents using Silverlight. Competent developers know the technologies well. And they know how far behind is Silverlight’s performance as compared to the current version of Flash player. Despite that, Silverlight will eventually attract a small population of developers who are well-versed in the .NET framework, and with no experience in Flash. These people are usually programmers who lack creative juices, and see lines of codes as cheese, and graphical user interface as expired milk. In such case, what kind of rich content can these people produce with Silverlight.

Wrapping up
Flex 3.0 is showing us the way to build rich internet applications. With its powerful set of features building on a stable platform, its ease of development coupled with a complete documentation, it will definitely attract many more web developers.

Following is a table of comparisms between the various RIA platforms. (in my own opinion)
-------------------------------Flex 3.0---------Silverlight 2.0---------Ajax
Capability----------------------9-------------------8---------------------6
Ease of development---------8-------------------9---------------------6
Documentation----------------9-------------------8---------------------6
Performance-------------------9-------------------7---------------------7
Value----------------------------9------------------8---------------------6
Market-------------------------10------------------4---------------------8
Overall--------------------------9------------------7--------------------6.5

The winner is clear. So let’s get “Flexified”. :=)

[kennethteo]

Hi all,

I've been quiet in this forum for a while now but i thought i should share some personal experience myself. Been coding Flex since June 2007 using Flex Builder 2 and now using Flex Builder 3.

Here's my review on Flex Builder 3 with comparison to Flex Builder 2.

The Flex License used to be either a Mac or Windows only. With Flex Builder 3 license to be available for mac and windows, i can dump my Parallels aside and use Flex Builder 3 on Leopard. The performance differences between the 2 os-es is much better. However, the mac version still eats alot of memory. Unless you have 4gb RAM, you better be careful when you run Flex Builder 3.

The Flex projects in FB3 is leaner now. I used to get irritated by the mess FB2 projects had. Now, you have src, html-templates and libs. But still i wished they had a better FB2 to FB3 project import support. The best advisable way to import is to manually copy your source files into a new FB3 project.

I am beginning to see more popular eclipse plugins in FB3 which is really what makes eclipse so wonderful. Refactoring, sort import statements are those that i make use more often. A feature that i am looking forward to is the clean up document feature. XML file are almost treated like flat files in FB3. Don't we use XMLs alot now?

My old custom components still work with FB3 and my complex datagrids are cleaner and faster now. The Flex SDK version selection comes in really handy when we still want to work with Flex SDK 2. The switch between SDK version is amazingly seamless.

The debugger is better now. FB3 uses and remembers the browser window that it opened when we 'Run' our applications. And the variable search is no longer messy anymore.

Does anyone think the export release build feature is useful? I think it is but i just didnt like it when a link is created in my project. Will be nice if we can name those links manually?

That's all the time i can spare for my review. Hope i can learn more about other good points of FB3 which fellow fusg-er have discovered.

Cheers!!

[flashmech]

For the duration that I had, to give my 2 cents review on the new Flex Builder 3 is never enough. But here goes anyway.

It has been quite a while since I last used Flex for any development, and I must first say that by just launching the brand new Flex Builder 3, it brings a whole new level of excitement and anticipation, as much word has gotten into my ears about the new revolutionary features and multiple time saver improvements. Such are the stuff that I have had wanted to try out for the longest time.

When talking about styling a Flex application, I'm certainly not the person to go to. Neither am I well versed on the nuts and bolts of how to style a Flex application, nor am I considered good with CSS. Back when I was learning how to use Flex Builder 2, topics on styling were always daunting to me.

Styling with CSS is now made so much simpler! Drag a component onto the stage, set up the styles according to how my eyes love them to be, click on the "Convert to CSS..." button, and by saving the file and choosing where I want to apply the new styles to, viola! I'm done! The real cream of the cake, however, is the new visual CSS editor, which simply kicks ass in my view.

From my newly generated CSS, I can now edit them visually without ever heading back to the documentation again to see which attributes are valid for the component, or what values and syntax are applicable for a specific attribute. It is such a great helper! From the viewpoint of a designer, I wouldn't need a developer now to realise my designs in an application! Everything is just a few clicks away. The visual CSS editor is a great convenience for the developers, and demystifies the process of getting the design into an application for the designers.

The other great new feature for skinning is the new "import skin artwork" wizard available in Flex Builder 3! As a move to integrate the CS3 graphic creation applications with Flex Builder 3, Adobe had strategically provided the necessary skin design templates that you can extend to any of these applications, namely Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. In my test I used Flash CS3 to create my swc skin, before giving the wizard a test run. It certainly dint disappoint, as it is much easier from the way I know how back when using Flex Builder 2.

The honorable mention from a developer viewpoint is the new refactoring support. Even though I am a developer who always tries best to adhere to best practices, it is too easy that a single class is being referred to from multiple places in a project. Furthermore, can you imagine if it is a project that you took over? With Flex Builder 2, it drove me nuts just to hunt and change those dodgy variables! It's all painless now, again, with just a couple of clicks away.

As a devigner (designer+developer), the enhancements that Adobe has done worked magic for me. I'm only using a fraction of the time of what it used to take me to style and skin my application, and to refactor my codes. With the amount of time I can save for each project, I can now invest them purposefully into creating more mind blowing effects, which is the stuff that I am truly passionate about. When I was using Flex Builder 2, I considered it to be a great RIA building tool already. Flex Builder 3 just got better. A whole lot better.

You guys may be wondering why I touched so much on integrating graphical elements and styling so much in my review. Well as I had mentioned earlier, these topics used to be extremely daunting (read: mind block) to me. With Flex Builder 3 I can now move so easily past these "obstacles"! There are still loads of features that I would love to get feet wet with though, and I know even the 60 days trial period wouldn't be enough to get myself there. I can't describe how much impact a Flex Builder 3 license will do for me.

It might even change my life.

[shunjie]

Hi all,

Thanks for the reviews! The result for the contest is out and...the verdict is that all 5 of you has won yourself a sparkling brand new Flex Builder 3 Professional License

Well done! The license should be on your way to your email now. If you did not receive the licenses, let me know.

[dannymurong]

Wooo Cheers! Thanks to Adobe!

[riswan]

why not notify all the member if got this event, Don know when can get this opportunity again?

[shunjie]

why not notify all the member if got this event, Don know when can get this opportunity again?

Hi Riswan, I think we have!

Don't worry another one will come real soon.