I’ve been using flash for a long time, mostly as an animation tool with a little dabbling in actionscript. Over the years I’ve moved from mostly making animations to mostly making small flash games or proof of concepts in my spare time. I’ve been very reluctant to learn as3 as I am not much of a programmer, but a friend of mine convinced me.
I was looking things up and I keep coming across Flex, I am not entirely sure what flex is and I was hoping someone could explain it to me. From what I’ve looked up, it sounds like flex is just actionscript outside of flash if that makes sense. Is this someone thing I should look into?
Both Flash and Flex use the ActionScript language — Flash CS3 and Flex 2 both support ActionScript 3 (which is compliant with the ECMAScript Edition 4), whereas the older version of Flash supports only ActionScript 2.
The differences between the two are:
1) Flash has been designed to facilitate the creation of interactive content, whereas Flex is geared toward application development.
2) Flash stores your application structure in a binary FLA file, whereas Flex uses a text file based on the markup language of Flex, MXML.
3) Different deployment models.
Flex originally was designed to bring enterprise programmers to the Flash Platform. As a result, Flex features tools designed to accommodate the special needs of hardcore programmers.
Take a look at this blog post which illustrates the strength and weaknesses of Flash and Felx quite nicely.