Peripheral thanks to the Jester — your blog posts helped me bridge my own semi-painful transition from Flash to Flex.

I am glad I did it however. I am a senior dev at a creative agency, and Jesse nails it on the head again as he mentions, what seems a trivial oversight to a designer is a back-breaking overhaul for a developer.

None-the-less, I have had very satisfactory results in managing all of my data, state, and server communication with Flex and layering in Flash-built components. We even managed a huge site pulling AS2 swfs into Flex. Happily Flex can get right inside AS3 swfs, and this workflow is eons better.

I would even say the workflow has indeed made me a better component-builder. Whereas the timeline-code temptation of Flash has produced some of the most gawdawful conglomerations of tightly linked objects, the conceptual base of Flex and AS3 is such that, inevitably, I began to more accurately understand the poetry of loosely-coupled objects. What has resulted is that I have components that function well in-and-of-themselves. This has made repurposing much less a coding marathon and more of an exchanging of assets.

Currently I’m frustrated with Flex 3 as I need to migrate old projects from Flex 2. I still don’t have a handle on the new security paradigms, and I have yet to get Cairngorm to compile without a missing Comsumer constant on the IServiceLocator resource. Strangely no one else seems of have had this problem.

And why is the damn properties window so damn buggy on XP and Vista???

@Tony, I like your smallworlds, it’s amazing. Though what I talking about is not Flex can make beautiful or not, most of real world applications are not games or social sites, but applications for daily boring tasks, user interface/interaction design is quite a part of weakness even some time it’s a job of developer.

@Jesse, I used to code in FlashDevelop for Flash projects (I never use Flash IDE actions panel to code except writing some sort of stop()). But now I have to use Flex Builder for pure Flex projects, more comfortable than half year before. No more FlashDevelop as I changed to Mac at home already.

Flex actually a great product I have to say, even there’re still lots of bugs. The more time working on Flex (pure Flex projects), the more I respect Flex team. The problem maybe, Adobe sometime introduced Flex ‘fast’ and ‘easy’ too much to bosses, and some companies and developers announced how fast they building their own Flex applications, that make developers’ life harder, especially developers coming from Flash community, thinking more user interface than RAD skills. For me I always feel no enough time to think deeper to make things more efficient and more RAD approach.

On the flip side, I can’t imagine using Flex in an agency environment. The fact you’ve tried means you’ve got mad willpower and a sense of adventure.

The whole “workflow” thing is such utter crap, too because no one defines what their workflow is, nor what their definition of design is. An agency’s version of “a designed app” is totally different from a software shop’s version. Furthermore, if a design doesn’t work technically, it’s an afterthought in a lot of the software projects. In an agency, it’s an f’ing nightmare for the developer; he has no choice to make it work even if that means working weakends, or re-coding things.

No one talks about what tools they use and how they use them AS WELL AS what environment. Pure Flex? Pure Flash? Using Flash, but doing the actual coding in another tool? I know Keith Peters and I are actually doing pure ActionScript 3 in FlexBuilder, using Flash for design assets, and no Flex… yet we’re not technically using Flash. So… FlexBuilder still allows us to do complicated designs. But I don’t go around saying I have no problems because I off-load those to Flash which does it well. Flash does not do coding as well as FlexBuilder, so together they are pretty darn good.

Why not code in FlashDevelop, FDT, or FlexBuilder and design in Flash? Works pretty well for me. Considering you’re doing more design work, I bet you can get away with more custom stuff also.

The approach, the metaphors and just about everything else made it a very difficult transition. I hope the future for Flex involves all of us working in environments that give us satisfaction.

ML