Question

articles like this one seem to say that Flex is a library for making desktop-like applications that run in Flash Player. But what confuses me is that I have already built AS3 applications that imitate desktop look and feel without any “flex”. I use libraries called fl.controls and fl.events, and it worked perfectly fine, with buttons, textboxes, listboxes, combo boxes etc.

Help me get my head around this issue. Is fl.controls and fl.events actually a part of flex, but I never realized this? Or are they a competing widget library/framework, but one that for marketing reasons Adobe did not bother assigning a sexy name like “flex”?

If flex is distinct from fl.controls and fl.events, can you use these libraries in a flex / AIR app? (I don’t care about the “flex” aspect, just want to make AIR apps) Or is it a matter of either-or, either the fl.* or the flex libraries in a single project?

Also, for clarity, I am now working in FlashDevelop and not in any of Adobe’s proprietary IDE’s. So I guess the difference between packages based on “which version of IDE got shipped with the particular library” is sort of lost on me.

Answer 1

The fl.controls library, from what I can tell, is really just a bunch of widgets you can use in Flash. Flex, on the other hand, is an application development framework with a set rich development capabilities you can’t get using AS3 and fl.controls alone.

Some of the things that Flex get you:

1. Declarative markup in the form of MXML
2. Data binding
3. State management
4. Skinning
5. A component model for creating your own composite components

By default, these controls are not imported when you create a new Flex project in Flash Builder. It appears, however, that it is possible.

From what I can tell, there aren’t many use cases for doing this (other than integrating legacy code) since Flex provides everything and more compared to the fl.controls.