Flex mobile? should I avoid it?

[GilAmran]

Hi,

I need to develop an app for mobile... And it looks like the Flex mobile framework is a huge time saver!

But I know the adobe dropped Flex to Apache... Should I avoid using it?

Thanks

Gil

[sinious]

They opened it up as opensource just like subversion or apache server, etc. This is only a good thing as it can be bug fixed using extra resources perhaps expeditiously.

Nothing feels as perfectly smooth as native. If you're willing to give up a little performance, I absolutely recommend using Flex for almost all app types from UI to games. The re-usable portions of your projects are a huge perk from device to device.

[GilAmran]

Does the Flex framework is part of Air?

I've compiled a flex mobile project with captive runtime (Air included) and it was ~9Mb. just like a regular ActionScript mobile project...

Does this means that Flex in included in Air? Why does Adobe do that? it's open source now...

[sinious · Accepted solution]

The AIR SDK and Flex SDK are different. For example you probably have AIR inside your flash environment but try loading something from the Flex SDK like something a spark component would use:

e.g. Flex:

import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;

Does that work for you? Probably not. It's only part of a modern Flex install.

Flex mobile introduces the spark components which are all mobile optimized. Adobe AIR is the runtime (VM) that gets exported captive and compiled down to ARM. You don't need to have a single Flex component in your AIR for Mobile project. AIR for Mobile does not require Flex.

[GilAmran]

Yea, I've created a Flex Desktop application and saw all the Flex swc files included.

And when I created a Flex Mobile application, I saw few swc files, like spark.swc, mobilecomponents.swc, rpc.swc, etc... but not flex...

I guess that they implemented all the needed components in the mobilecomponents.swc...

Thanks for the answer

[sinious]

It including spark.swc means you have the mobile optimized flex components for mobile. That's what spark is. Just make sure those components have classes such as I mentioned to work well. Like a Spark List component can use a mx.collections.ArrayCollection as its dataProvider.