I am not going to insult your intellence and try to teach you how to use Adobe Flex because frankly, I am just learning. Over the past few months, every major project and intitiative I’ve heard about has components built using Adobe Flex. With the emergence of Flash as a usable technology and ActionScript as a top notch coding language, Adobe Flex has quickly become the hottest new tool in ubertrendy web development circles.
So what is it? And what does it do? Well, the according to Adobe: “Create engaging, cross-platform rich internet applications. Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.”
For me, it’s takes all the possibilities of flash, seemlessly intergrates it into about any appication you want, allows the interactivity of AJAX, and does so with a very basic knowledge of ActionScript. The more ActionScript you know, the more amazing things you can do. If you’re used to coding in PHP or standard ASP, it’s a completely new and intuative way to look at application development, yet not so farfetched that you’d never catch on. It almost reminds me of .NET when I first started looking into it, as I wondered where it had been all my life… Yet this is totally cross-browser and platform capible.
So you want to see it in action? Here’s the demo from Adobe that literally blew me away. I’ve created video sites on numerous occasions and have used RSS feeds extensively throughout these sites. I feel like I’ve written very similar scripts using PHP and ASP that took at least a week to create. With Flex, this demo had the base of what took me at least a few hours done in the first minute! Check out this demo! FLEX APP
One of the things I love about Flex, and why I think if you’re a serious developer, you need to get in on the ground floor is… It’s a hot technology that hasn’t been exploited. Look through the job openings for .NET developers and see there is a HUGE need and numerous opportunities. This could give you the opportunity to be IN DEMAND in the job market and name your own price as one of the oldest and most established Flex developers. This technology is so new, they haven’t even finished the training course on Adobe’s Website!
And the best part of all, Adobe is allowing a great 60 day trial of their Flex Builder 3. Take 2 months and play around with this in your spare time. I think you might find that it’ll not only help you create much better applications but it will increase your marketability and portfolio in no time.
So give it a try… And if you become a top notch developer, be sure to remember the guy who got you started 
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