Exploring Adobe Flex For The First Time

Adobe Flex is an SDK from Adobe for creating Flash applications based on XML and ActionScript. No need for Flash MX or Flash CS3, just markup, markup, markup and some ECMA-script thrown in for making it all come together. While I’m no fan of flash content on sites, this adventure has it’s purpose: making an open source multifile upload application. Every now and then I run into the need for allowing people to upload several files at once (think 20 – 100 files), and selecting each by itself would be really tiresome. The only good solution I’ve come across so far is the flash based uploaders, so well, here we go. The plan is to release the result under a MIT-based license.

Flex has been quite good to me so far. The UI of the application is built as a XML file, and the code is simply added as ActionScript in a CDATA-section in the XML-file. Simple. You then run the XML-file (MXML) through a compiler (mxmlc) and get a ready-to-run .swf file out. Works like a charm.