flex it

I went to a Flex workshop hosted by Boston IxDA, and left very grateful. The one thing I love about this industry is that people go out of their way to help each other, share knowledge - and even feed each other yummy sandwiches.

Designing in Flex is fun as hell. Creating an accordion menu, something that would take a few hours even if you were using a JavaScript library, instead takes seconds. The IDE is great, very easy to use. The code syntax, even if it is questionable in some aspects, seems pretty straightforward.

Sure, there are some limitations. Flex depends on Flash, and comes with a download penalty. There is no support for external configuration files, and CSS linking is suspect - so, essentially, every aspect of the Flex application is hardcoded. Finally, same as with Flash, once the text goes into the app, you can't really pull it out (e.g., through copy-and-paste). Supposedly, Silverlight is much better from that perspective.

But, all in all, this tutorial gave me hope that someday we won't be wasting time with CSS layouts and JavaScript code... but, we'll see. Not quite there yet.

Oh yeah: the instructor wrote up very detailed instructions on setting up the Flex environment - check it out, everything is free!