How to Compile the Application into a SWF in Adobe Flex 2

What we now want to do is take this very, very simple application that we have done and actually compile this into a SWF file. So one of the things that will make this very easy is just automatically have this Flex IDE compile every time you click the Save button.

When you compile especially for those of you who are used to working with Flash, you will see that the Flex Integrated Development Environment really gives us a lot of errors and very verbose error messages. For those of you who are used to Flash, you know it sightedly failed quite a bit. So with Flex we really get error handling which makes debugging so much easier. So if you click on Project up here and you click on Build Automatically and you will see in my case this is already checked and it maybe in your case too, but please make sure that this checked. What this means is this will actually compile into a SWF file each time you click Save.

So you will see I have clicked Save and in this case I have no problems and it's compiled this into a SWF file and again there are no errors. So if I simply click up here on this green button, what this will do is this will actually run my SWF file within a browser so you can get an idea of exactly how your application will be working.

So I have clicked this button, you should see it starts my web browser along with my application. Here is the label control that you added and you specified your name and you will see your input text field here, I can type my name right here. So that's a very basic MXML application that you built. I am going to close off my browser by clicking here and this will take me back to my Flex Builder IDE.

Now as I said before if you compile something and there are errors for example let's just remove this open quote and click on File, Save, any errors that are caught at compile time, you will see these errors here open quote is expected for attribute and it tells you exactly what the problem is as well as what line number this is occurring at which is the very important reason for turning on Line Numbering to help you with debugging.

So you will click here and you will fix the error and then you will recompile it simply by clicking Save because you turned on Build Automatically and you will see that error disappears. Now there are two types of errors that occur in the Flex environment and one type is a Compile Time Error which you just saw which is indicated in the problems and then one of the new features of the Flash Player 9 is the ability to see run time errors and run time errors are actually displayed within the browser and we will be seeing some of these run time errors as we go throughout the course.