Flex

What it is

Flex was a software development kit for building rich internet applications that ran on Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Created at Macromedia and continued by Adobe, it was aimed at business applications rather than animation: forms, data grids, charts and dashboards that talked to a server. Developers built it with Flash Builder, an Eclipse-based IDE, and could compile it from the command line.

Layouts were written in MXML, an XML-based markup, with logic in ActionScript 3. Adobe gave Flex to the Apache Software Foundation, where it continued as Apache Flex under the Apache License 2.0. With Flash Player gone from browsers, it is now mostly found in legacy systems. Some of those systems are still in daily use inside companies.

How I use it

• At Metal Mountain Resources, 2008 to 2016, built an object-oriented Flex, PHP and MySQL CRM tracking investors, investment activity and user statistics.
• The CRM handled tax issuance and shareholder communication across Metal Mountain, Eagle Peak and Rich Rock Resources.
• Customer-tailored solutions in Flex through my independent contracts.

Flex was the right tool in its day for a data-heavy business application that needed a richer interface than HTML could give at the time. I used it for exactly that, a CRM behind a PHP and MySQL back end. The same idea, a rich client over a PHP and MySQL back end, carried into the systems I build today.

Questions