1.1. Tools for Writing ActionScript Code

ActionScript code is written in plain text, so an ActionScript program can be created with nothing more than a simple text editor, such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Macintosh. However, most ActionScript programmers write ActionScript code using one (or both) of two commercial tools produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated: Flex Builder and the Flash authoring tool.

Flex Builder is an integrated development environment, or IDE. An IDE is an application for writing and managing code, much as a word processor is an application for creating printed documents. Developers use Flex Builder to create software applications and multimedia content using either ActionScript or MXML, or both. MXML is an XML-based language for describing user interfaces.