That??™s right;
you can get started with Flex today if you want, at absolutely no cost! The SDK is free, as is of
course the Flash runtime. There is, however, a commercial Flex IDE that Adobe sells as well,
which you may want to look at if you decide to work with Flex on a regular basis. As you might
imagine, this example has a much greater ???wow??? factor if you actually play with it, so I very
much recommend having a look if you think Flex might be something you are interested in. It
showcases quite a lot of, well, Flash, that is, various animations and effects, as you navigate
the application.
All in all, Flex is, in my opinion (and in the growing opinion of many) a very viable alternative
to Ajax-based applications, and may even represent the single best alternative available
today.
What are the negatives about Flash, and by extension Flex? First, it has a bit of a bad reputation
because it is so easy to abuse. Many people choose to not install it or block all Flash
content from their browser. Second, in the case of Flash, it is not completely ???typical??? programming;
it is a little more like creating a presentation in the sense that you have to deal with
the concept of a ???timeline,??? so there can be a bit of a learning curve for ???traditional??? developers.
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