Flex Development Versus Flash Authoring

If you are reading this because your expertise is in Flash and ActionScript, you need to know a few things before we proceed. As mentioned earlier, Flex is, at its core, just a set of ActionScript 3.0 classes. Therefore, if you were to lock yourself in a room with nothing more than the Flash Authoring tool (or a text editor, for that matter), you too could probably produce something that works in a similar vein as Flex. And if you were truly committed, you could probably write something in Python or Java that would let you use an XML-derived language to quickly and easily define layout controls for your applications. The thing is, you don’t actually need to do that; Macromedia/Adobe already did that hard work and produced Flex.

Also, there is nothing stopping you from creating content in Flash and including it within your Flex applications. Chapter 11, “Creating Flex Components with Flash Professional CS5,” looks at how to leverage Flash for that very purpose.