FLEX vs AIR

Hi creative people!

I am bothering you all again!, sorry..

What is the difference between AIR and FLEX ? I’ve been reading about them but quite not understand what are their applications in the real world. Are they similar? Which is best to learn? Guess this depends on my approach and market I work with.

Is there any good reference book for any of them?

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

flex and air is the same thing, when you learn one you know the other. AIR is a desktop solutions for RIA and Flex is an online solution. The bouth work the same and are compiled from AS3

Thanks mpc!

Flex “was” a program to develop application in AIR . Now that program(in beta) its called Flash Builder 4. Both Adobe Flash and Flash Builder create application in AS3 . Difference its that Flash Builder can deploy this application also on the AIR framework, that’s in my opinion an advanced flash plugin who can interact with the operating system, writing and deleting files etc.

Flex “was” a program to develop application in AIR . Now that program(in beta) its called Flash Builder 4. Both Adobe Flash and Flash Builder create application in AS3 . Difference its that Flash Builder can deploy this application also on the AIR framework, that’s in my opinion an advanced flash plugin who can interact with the operating system, writing and deleting files etc.

Fkex is not the name of the framework is name of the technology, thats why adobe change the name to Flash Builder to avoid the confusion. So there are Flex and AIR applications.

thanks guys, very useful information.. I didn’t knew that before

Fkex is not the name of the framework is name of the technology, thats why adobe change the name to Flash Builder to avoid the confusion. So there are Flex and AIR applications.

The Flex framework is a cross-platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems, and beyond the browser with Adobe® AIR ™.

Adobe Flash® Builder™ 4 beta 2 (formerly Flex Builder) released on Oct 5, 2009 A professional-grade, Eclipse™ based IDE designed to help software developers build rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the open source Flex framework.

Fkex is not the name of the framework is name of the technology, thats why adobe change the name to Flash Builder to avoid the confusion. So there are Flex and AIR applications.

Adobe Labs :

The Flex framework is a cross-platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems, and beyond the browser with Adobe® AIR ™.

Adobe Flash® Builder™ 4 beta 2 (formerly Flex Builder) released on Oct 5, 2009 A professional-grade, Eclipse™ based IDE designed to help software developers build rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the open source Flex framework.

you are right I ment that Flex is not the name of code editor but technology/framework

Thank you all! Now things are getting down to earth..

let me take a turn…

Flex is just a way to build SWFs. Flash is another way to build SWFs. Generally SWFs are embedded into web pages and viewed online.

AIR is simply a wrapper/runtime that frees the SWFs from their web pages and allows them to run on your users’ desktops without a browser or connection to the net. They get many features like file system access that are never granted to an SWF in a web page.

With the latest versions of Flex Builder and Flash, you can produce both SWFs and AIR files.

So the choice is not whether to learn Flex or AIR . If you wish to produce AIR files your choice is would you prefer to use Flex or Flash to produce the AIR files? (there is even a 3rd way to create AIR files using HTML and Ajax!)