Colin Moock has written a book called Essential ActionScript 3.0 and I am making it one of my goals to learn how to use as many open source languages as possible to expand on the knowledge I have gained building applications in Symphony, using XML, XSLT and CSS. I’m keenly interested in knowing how the open source Flex SDK 3 can be used to create Rich Internet Applications that integrate with applications like Symphony, built on open source standards such as XML and XSLT.
First, I need a compiler. For whatever reason, I cannot use Adobe Flash CS3 at home, even though I have a license that allows having Flash installed at home and at work. For whatever reason, the CS3 install I have at home just stopped working. Strange. I’ll have to reinstall at some point. For now, I’m going to use the Flex 3 SDK to compile ActionScript from source. I have a previous version of Flex, the Flex 2 SDK, but I’m going to download the latest Software Developers Kit to see how compatible Colin’s book will be with the latest version of Flex. ActionScript 3.0 has not changed, so I don’t foresee a problem.
Adobe has provided some documentation on Getting Started with Flex 3 SDK in the Adobe Flex Developer Center. The Developer Documentation for Adobe Flex is also available at Adobe Open Source.
To start with, I have downloaded the Flex 3 SDK and installed it where I can easily access it on the command line:
~/flex_sdk_3
I’m using Mac OS X 10.5.3, so that means I have installed the Flex 3 SDK at the root of my user directory:
/Users/stephen/flex_sdk_3
I also followed the recommendation to uninstall the Flash Player before installing the player supplied with the SDK.
~/flex_sdk_3/runtimes/player/mac/Install Flash Player 9 UB.dmg
I have chosen to use Panic’s Coda as my IDE for developing ActionScript. It is a text editor with some nice extras, including a built in Terminal and web browser based on Apples’s WebKit project used to build Safari. There’s no reason you couldn’t use free tools: Terminal, Safari and TextWrangler, for instance. But I love working with Panic’s well-designed tools, such as Coda and Transmit.
In the first chapter, Colin provides an overview of the tools for writing ActionScript code: text editor, Adobe Flex Builder, and Adobe Flash; describes the Flash Client Runtime Environment, Compilation. Then, he jumps right into a step-by-step process of creating a virtual zoo example program to teach the core concepts about:
DesignProjectX | The digital sandbox of Stephen Bau