Adobe Flex Builder Pro 3.0

List Price: $699.00 Discount Price: $669.00

Features:

• Enables intelligent coding; interactive step-through debugging; and visual design of user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of business-critical RIAs
• Ability to import assets from Adobe Creative Suite 3 makes it easy for designers and developers to work together
• Take advantage of editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS; syntax coloring; statement completion; code collapse; interactive step-through debugging; and more
• Visually design and preview user interface layout, appearance, and behavior using a rich library of built-in or custom components
• All of the powerful features included in Flex Builder 3 Standard, plus powerful testing tools and interactive data visualization

Customer Reviews:

Flex Builder 3 Pro is the Xcode of web application development [Posted on 2008-08-31]
Flex 3, the framework and the Flex Builder 3 Pro IDE (just "Flex" from now on), are perhaps the best kept secret in programming I've witnessed (this being the first Amazon review for a product released back in February? Amazing!). Specific to web development, I've worked with several other scripting languages (e.g., Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby) and their available frameworks, assistive text editors, and integrated development environments like Dreamweaver, Servoy, and Eclipse (which is what Flex Builder runs on). These are all fine approaches to building web applications, but for my time, effort, and money, Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3 Pro (Eclipse) is my top choice.

Flex offers a three-tiered approach to building powerful applications and "rich" user experiences. The first tier is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) design mode editor. You can create the lion's share of your application, and practically the entire user interface and design themes (which are CSS-based), in design mode. Next, Flex offers a simple and lean XML-based language (MXML), which serves as a framework and front-end for ActionScript (i.e., Flash). You code in MXML (with considerably fewer lines of code than it would take to code directly in ActionScript), and the the compiler automatically generates your ActionScript from your MXML. For maximum tweaking and customization, you can code directly in ActionScript. You can and usually will, of course, mix the three approaches within one application, and this is remarkably easy and integrated. Documentation is comprehensive. The Flex component and style explorers are awesome. The community is generous and helpful, and there's lot's of free source code, examples, etc.

So, this is as much a 5-star review for Flex 3 as it is for Flex Builder 3 Pro. I cannot imagine using one without the other.

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