Introducing the Adobe Flex 2 Advanced Visual Programming Training Guide

Welcome to Flex 2 Advanced Visual Programming. My name is Leo Schuman. I am an Adobe Certified Master, Instructor, and Developer, and a Sun Certified JAVA Programmer. I have been teaching, writing about in programming for the Web full time since 1998. Over the past several years, I have spent a few thousand hours with hundreds of designers and developers teaching XML, HTML, CSS, JAVA, Coldfusion, SQL, Flash, ActionScript, and over the past couple of years, Adobe Flex.

I now work primarily as a writer, editor, and an instructor for Adobe Systems Customer Training Group, and Total Training has been kind enough to invite me to share some information about this hot new technology, Adobe Flex 2. This series of lessons was essentially designed to answer in detail one key question, “How do you write beautiful, compelling interfaces for the Web?”

As you know from your previous Flex programming experience, the binary code generated by the Flex 2 Compiler runs in the Flash Player 9 runtime engine, commonly just called the Flash Player. It's the foundation technology of the Adobe Flash platform running on over 300,000,000 devices worldwide. Amongst many other possibilities, this cross technology platform opens a range of design potentials unmatched by any similarly widespread technology.

So why does design matter? Why should we even care if our software interfaces are beautiful, flexible, intriguing? It's a tough market out there. It's no longer enough that a chunk of code gets the job done; our user's experience matters to the bottom line. If our interfaces aren't compelling and easy to use, go, go, use something else. This is why Adobe Flex 2 gives you the power to implement sophisticated and demanding design concepts, using technologies, approaches, and interactive metaphors already familiar in the design community.

During this series, we'll also briefly review core techniques, we assume you're experienced with from the first total training series, and your own experience with Flex, ActionScript, and other programming languages. These will include Event Handling, Data Binding, Custom MXML components, Custom Event Dispatching, Loading XML as an Array Collection, and the new E4X XML Parsing Syntax.

We'll also assume in these lessons that you are comfortable with basic programming tasks, such as declaring variables and writing functions, loops and conditions; also as MXML and ActionScript 3, the foundation technologies of Flex are both object-oriented.

We'll also assume that you have basic familiarity with object oriented programming terms, such as Property, Method, Class, Object and Instance. If these terms are new to you, you will find many useful introductions to the object oriented thought process on the Web.

ActionScript 3 is more than similar enough to the JAVA Programming Language that high level discussions about object oriented programming and design patterns in JAVA will teach you a lot about using modern ActionScript.

Now once you have completed this series, and practiced the techniques you learned, you'll be prepared to take visually sophisticated comps and graphic assets from your design team, and put them to work creating compelling, beautiful software; software that people want to use.

In our first lesson, we'll start by installing a proprietary Adobe font which we will be using in this course called Poetica Standard. Then we will take a look at the Natural Experiences application we will be building throughout this series. Along the way, we'll review the basics of creating workspaces, and importing projects into Adobe Flex Builder 2.