The neat thing is that you compile a
Flex page (which is a file with an extension of .mxml) into a Flash SWF file, which then runs in a
Flash browser plug-in (or stand-alone Flash player), typically launched from an HTML page
(just like any Flash movie embedded in a web page, but in this case the web page is literally
nothing but a container and launcher for the Flash file). What this provides is a very rich UI
experience, as well as providing more system-specific services such as the ability to write to
the local file system, the ability to make HTTP requests to servers, the ability to make web
service??“like requests to a suitable server, and much more. Flex is starting to gain a lot of
momentum among developers because it gives you the ability to present an extremely rich
user interface in your applications while having most of the benefits of HTML and JavaScriptbased
applications, including cross-platform support and no deployment woes, not to
mention saving you having to deal with the sometimes sticky details of Ajax, concurrent user
events, etc.
In Figure 1-17, you can see an example of a Flex application. This is one of the sample
applications that comes packaged with the Flex SDK, which is a free download.
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