I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.

FlexBuilder provides a high quality IDE for developing Flex applications, especially for Java developers already familiar with the Eclipse IDE. It does cost money – please get over it. Good tools do tend to cost money, even though the Java community seems to have thrown this notion out the window – partly because we have adapted to using inferior tools.

I will say that it is a bit of a stretch for Adobe to suggest that the Flex Builder is ready for enterprise development on Linux. I have been living the Linux Flex Builder there, and there is absolutely no refactoring support (painful). This is an essential feature for any modern IDE. I know they have released the Linux version under Alpha, but many of their people have proclaimed it as bringing Flex development to Linux. There doesn’t appear to be any roadmap for when one can expect these features. So, I wouldn’t expect them anytime soon – my personal solution was to buy a Mac. Also, this is completely independent of the runtime – the Flash Player on Linux seems to work quite flawlessly in my experience.