Making the move from Flash to Flex

Posted by Administrator – January 10, 2008

A lot of people get confused about when to use flex and when to use flash and the benefits / drawbacks of each. It really depends on the nature of the project, but for the most part I always recommend using Flex (at least if you are a developer). Even if the project is an ActionScript only project, you can still benefit from the Eclipse development environment. The only thing you loose when using Flex is access to the Flash Library, but you can still use Flash in combination. There is a couple ways to do this, which I will explain in future posts.

Some benefits of using Flex for AS3 projects:

  1. Shared class libraries between projects.
  2. Easily Package and distribute code.
  3. Subversion support for version controlling your code (via eclipse plugin)
  4. Advanced Search and Replace capabilities.

Some drawbacks of using Flex for AS3 projects:

  1. No Timeline!
    • But you can use “Copy Motion as AS3″ which I’ll cover in a later post
  2. No Library!
    • But you can embed assets from a compiled flash movie into your Flex project
    • Or you can use the new Flex component kit for Flash CS3 and actually embed a flash project into flex and control it from your flex project

I’ll cover some of the details of these techniques in future posts.

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