Creating Flex Components

Not only does Flex have built-in support for properties and events, it includes a higher-level abstraction language (MXML) for laying out and configuring components, which greatly simplifies the development process. You can even create new components directly in MXML, although that's more commonly done using ActionScript. This article shows how to create components in Flex and how clean the resulting applications can be that use those components.

You'll see that ActionScript is quite similar to Java in many ways, but I hope you'll also see that ActionScript includes time-saving features that don't appear in Java.

Although you can write all your Flex code by hand and compile it using mxmlc (the free command-line compiler), it's much easier to use FlexBuilder which is built on top of Eclipse and has command completion, context help, built-in debugging and more. Some of the examples in this article use AIR, a beta feature that allows you to create desktop applications that access files and other aspects of your local machine (rather than being limited to the web sandbox).