Chapter 1. Making the case

Why is Flex a great addition to your personal skill set or organization? With buzzwords flying all over, a nonstop stream of websites with missing vowels in their names, and the Web 2.0 space on fire, a hodgepodge of technologies leaves the common developer caught in the middle. It’s vital to be able to defend the decision to move forward with Flex to both customers and management.

In this chapter, we talk about challenges that a web developer faces and how to solve them using Flex by Adobe. We also get into the mechanics of a Flex application and discuss the ecosystem as a whole. But before we get into that, we want to identify the problem that Flex solves, so let’s begin with how the problem emerged with the proliferation of web applications.

1.1. Why are web applications so prolific?

Web applications are so prolific because the strength of the web is also its weakness. The original intent of the web was to be a lightweight information distribution system: a simple and platform-neutral way (any OS, any hardware) to post documents on a server and retrieve them as easily.

1.2. The RIA solution

1.3. The RIA contenders

1.4. Becoming acquainted with Flex

1.5. How Flex works

1.6. What’s new in Flex 4

1.7. Summary