Hi,
I currently have the Beta of ASV 6 which decompiles my AS3 SWF's
without too many problems.
Regarding Flash vs Flex debates, I have not got CS3 yet, but have
been developing in AS3 using Flash Develop and importing graphics
created in Flash 8, but following a very code oriented way of
development. I like this and will probably keep working in this way as
I do a lot of stuff with animations, etc. For pure business stuff, I
would certainly consider using Flex and saying that I have been
developing some prototype systems for very simple website ideas in Flex
to see if I can get a nice workflow going.
The tutorials that Adobe put with Flex Builder are a great starting
point as someone mentioned and I also took advantage of the free trials
from Adobe/Total Training that were pretty good:
http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/flex2_ria.asp - this is a
really good introduction - a refresher for me - to using Flex and
thinking in terms of RIA's. I liked the presenters style and it
contrasted a lot with the one below.
http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/flex2_avp.asp - this was
okay, but I found the presenter very dull - his voice did not help and I
am sure they sped it up in the intros. I got quite irritated watching a
lot of basics in a training package that specified you needed to have
these skills beforehand. It does however provide some very helpful
information about making Flex applications look a lot better than the
default.
If you are a visual developer, Flex will probably be a bit scary
because you need to start learning how to code the visual parts using
MXML to get what you want.
As far as CMS stuff goes - if you are looking to connect to an
existing back-end system like Drupal, Wordpress, etc. There are already
a lot of components written to handle all the back-end stuff, which
saves a lot of pain writing your own. This is particularly important if
you are not experienced in server side coding - MySQL, PHP and the
security issues that tend to affect these things.
For Flash, if you like coding in AS2, you could look at SWX,
http://swxformat.org/, which is really easy to get started with. They
are porting it to AS3 at the moment, but it is very straightforward and
also has the benefit of being very lightweight when compared with XML
methods - this is important if you plan to work with mobiles, etc.
SWX is like a nice halfway between XML & AMF remoting - it has the
ease of getting data into your app, with the streamlined nature of AMF
The good thing is that there are lots of ways for you to talk to the
server(s) from the SWF player now and they have all improved
dramatically with a lot of support from various people, so experiment a
lot if you have time and read lots of info - the devnet site on Adobe is
invaluable as well as Google.
There is a lot of stuff out there to learn and I am no expert, but I
have been trying out a lot of stuff in Flash, Flex & related
technologies and will say one is outright better than the other - it
depends on your experience & the problem you are trying to solve.
Hopefully, I will be able to keep up with both strands of development
and do some cool stuff with them.
Glen
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