Foreword to the First Edition

The ability to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has been around much longer than the term itself; since version 8, the Flash Platform has been a viable RIA platform. But it was initially geared toward designers using the environment from a creative perspective, which wasn’t ideal for those coming from a pure development background.

If you were a Flash application developer, major hurdles still remained in your way. Delivering feature-laden rich applications in a productive and timely manner was difficult because you had to do most of the work yourself.

The challenge became clear and simple: provide a pure development environment that leveraged the ubiquity and capabilities of Flash yet catered directly to developers and their systems-development lifecycle. Give developers tools to be productive, and give them a framework that did most of the hard work for them so that they could focus their efforts on application logic. The solution to this challenge was Flex.

Flex has been on quite a journey since its release in March 2004 by Macromedia. That first version was followed by the more widely distributed version 1.5 later that year. Flex started as a server product and was billed as a way for developers to create applications on the Flash Platform.