Flex Learning Path – Manager
Your background: Program or product manager
Your goal: Get familiar with Flex and its capabilities, how it works, and how to manage a Flex project
Learn to successfully manage a Flex project
- See Flex in Action
- In this task, you will browse rich Internet applications built in Flex that are used across a broad variety of industries and use cases.
This will provide you with inspiration and ideas, let you see what Flex is capable of, and also give you a look at who is using Flex.
Be sure to explore the Flex showcase which is a Flex application
letting you browse and search for
publicly available Flex applications. In addition to the companies included there, many other companies are developing Flex RIAs for
internal applications where complex business processes are simplified by more interactive applications
that display rich data. Oracle, SAP, Business Objects, and other enterprise software companies are also integrating Flex
technology with their enterprise applications.
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- Website: In online applications, use Picnik, an online photo editor
- Website: In media and entertainment, explore the Amgen Tour of California, a tool for tracking a professional bicycle race
- Website: In media and entertainment, watch episodes of the popular NBC television series, Friday Night Lights
- Website: In retail and commerce, use Sony Ericsson's product selector for mobile devices
- Website: Browse Adobe featured applications
- Make the business case for an RIA
- In this task, you will learn about the benefits of building a rich Internet application (RIA), including higher customer
conversion rates, increased user productivity, and improved customer loyalty. You also learn how to measure these benefits.
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- Article: Understand the benefits of RIAs
- Website: Read RIA analyst reports
- Article: Understand the business case for RIAs
- Presentation video: Listen to the CTO from Allurent discuss measuring RIA effectiveness
- White paper: Get data for enhancing eCommerce ROI through RIAs
- Blog post and presentation: Measure the ROI of choosing Flex for enterprise RIAs
- Decide to choose Flex
- In this task, you will hear the community compare Flex to other technologies that can be used to build engaging rich
Internet applications.
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- Video: Listen to Finetune decisionmakers tell you why they chose Flex and Adobe AIR
- Video: Listen to a customer talk about choosing an RIA technology
- Article: Compare the same application in Flex, Silverlight, and JavaFX
- Blog post: Compare Flex and Silverlight
- Article: Decide when to use Flex and Ajax
- Article: Choose between Ajax and Flex
- Website: Look at Flash Player penetration statistics
- Article: Read about three reasons to use Flex
- Plan for success
- In this task, you will learn from community experts about what it takes to plan for the successful development
and launch of a Flex application. This also includes ensuring usability of your application which is covered in a subsequent task.
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- White paper: Plan for RIA success
- Blog post: Learn what it takes to create great Flex RIAs
- Blog post: Get tips for managing projects from a developer's perspective (ongoing series)
- Blog post: Market your Flex application
- Put together a team
- In this task, you will learn the different roles necessary for building a successful Flex application.
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- Presentation video: Understand designer and developer roles, skill sets, and interaction
- Blog post: Learn to staff Flex developers
- Blog post: Decide if you need a user experience expert
- Ensure Flex RIA usability
- In this task, you will learn how to ensure that your Flex application is responsive, intuitive, and goal-oriented allowing
users to easily accomplish their tasks. Although these articles will get you started and give you a good understanding of
the concepts, ensuring RIA usability is usually the domain of interaction designers, information architects,
and other user experience designers. For additional reading, check out the list of references included at the end of
each of the resources included below.
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- Article: Design for Flex
- Article: Learn heuristics for RIA development
- Article: Develop usable RIAs
- Manage workflows between designers and developers
- In this task, you will learn how designers and developers work together to build a Flex application and how to facilitate
the workflow between them. For more details on how the various designer and developer tools work together, see the
Integrate with Creative Suite task in the
Designer/Developer path.
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- Presentation video: Understand designer and developer roles, skill sets, and interaction (40:00)
- Presentation video: Optimize designer/developer workflow (53:10)
- Presentation video: Examining Flex project workflows - a case study (1:00:39)
- Article: Understand the designer and developer workflow
- Article: Manage the designer and developer workflow in Flex projects
- Video: Get a sneak peak at the new designer tool Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo) (4:33)
Learn about the technology
- See how Flex fits into the Adobe RIA solution
- In this task, you will learn about the Adobe Flash Platform including its
tools (Flex Builder and Creative Suite), clients (Flash Player and Adobe AIR),
frameworks (Flex and Ajax), and servers and services (ColdFusion, LiveCycle, BlazeDS, Adobe Flash Media Server,
and Scene7).
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- Video: Compare Flash, Flex, Flash Player, and Adobe AIR (5:30)
- Presentation video: Listen to Adobe discuss their RIA Roadmap (54:19)
- Website: Explore the Adobe Flash Platform
- White paper: Adobe Flash Platform at a glance
- Learn how Flex works
- In this task, you will get an overview of how Flex works and the tools you need to build a Flex application.
You develop the application in Flex Builder, a powerful authoring tool based on
the popular Java development environment Eclipse.
You build your application using the components in the Flex SDK, which includes visual controls, containers,
managers, and utilities.
You write your code using ActionScript or a combination of ActionScript and MXML. ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful
object-oriented programming language based on ECMAScript Edition 4 proposal and is used to create client logic.
MXML is a declarative XML-based language that can be used to describe UI layout and behaviors.
You talk to back-end data and business logic using HTTP requests, web services, or Flash Remoting with
ColdFusion, BlazeDS, LiveCycle, or other third-party products. For more details on communicating with the
server, see the subsequent Talk to the server task
in this Manager path.
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- Website: Explore the Adobe Flash Platform
- White paper: Get a glance of the Adobe Flash Platform
- Article: Understand the tools for creating a Flex RIA
- Article: Understand MXML
- Quick Start: Get an overview of coding with MXML and ActionScript
- AIR application: Explore pre-built visual components in the Tour de Flex component explorer
- Learn about specific framework features
- In this task, you will get an understanding of how to incorporate standard requirements into
your Flex application, including
changing the look and feel of your application with styles and skins,
making your application accessible,
localizing your application for multiple languages,
ensuring your application can be searched and indexed,
and enabling standard browser-based navigation.
For more details on how you can customize the look of an application, see the
Customize an application
goal in the Designer/Developer path.
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- Website: Play with the Style Explorer to see how you can use styles and CSS to customize an application
- Website: Make a Flex application accessible
- Video: Build multilingual Flex applications
- White paper: Read Adobe's SWF searchability FAQ
- Documentation: Enable browser navigation of your Flex application
- Talk to the server
- In this task, you will learn the options for talking to back-end data and business logic.
You can make requests to the server using HTTP requests, web services, or Flash Remoting which uses
AMF (Action Message Format, a binary, serialized data transport format) and provides a fast, efficient
means of transporting data to your RIA which accelerates application performance. You will
also learn about the various technologies and products available to implement Flash Remoting, messaging,
and data management services with your particular application server.
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- Article: Understand the options for communication between a Flex application and the server
- Documentation: Understand the options for getting and sending data
- Website: Learn about BlazeDS for integrating with a Java back end
- Website: Learn about LiveCycle Data Services ES for integrating with a Java back end
- Article: Compare BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES
- Website: Learn about AMFPHP for integrating with a PHP back end
- Website: Learn about FluorineFx for integrating with a .NET back end
- Website: Learn about WebORB for integrating with a Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or .NET back end
- Find and use non Flex framework components
- In this task, you will browse for components that are not part of the Flex framework but that can
easily be incorporated into your applications. Some of these components are created by Adobe,
some are created by other companies and developers. Some components are free and others cost money.
If you don't find what you are looking for, you can always have your developers create their own components.
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- Website: Go to flex.org
- Website: Go to the Flex component exchange
- AIR application: Look at advanced data visualization components in the Tour de Flex component explorer
- Website: Check out the iElixir advanced data visualization components
- Website: Check out the open source ASTRA Flex components on the Yahoo! Developer Network
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