Chapter 2. Introduction to Flex 3 Framework
Traditionally, web pages come with a number of restrictions such as slow and synchronous request and response models, different cross-browser rendering, and reloading the entire page for each action. They also lack what you find with the features of desktop applications such as sophisticated user interfaces and great design, view states, the ability to handle large amounts of data, reusability, and fast communications.
When it comes to designing great-looking and performing desktop-like applications, we need more than just HTML pages. Flex gives you just what you need for transforming a traditional web user interface into a great user experience. Typically, these applications are known as RIAs—a term that was originally introduced by Macromedia (now merged into Adobe) and which stands for Rich Internet applications.
Flex is a set of technologies for building and deploying RIAs on a Flash platform. Flex uses a mixture of MXML scripting and ActionScript...
