Flex on Facebook

Posted February 2008 by kevin

Alex Notov, editor at Startupism.com, gave a quick talk on the value of using Adobe Flex for developing Facebook applications. Flex 2 is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Alex gave over 20 different reasons for using Flex, but here are my top three from his presentation.

  • Cross browser compatibility
  • Graphics easier to create/manipulate, no need for DOM based GUI manipulation
  • Build once, deploy to many. (blogs, widgets, Bebo, Myspace.)

Is learning Flex easy? Alex says YES, if you know object oriented programming languages like Java and C++. You can get started with the Flex Builder IDE that makes development easy.

Alex demo’ed two Facebook applications using Flex:

OneClick Pay - “OneClick Pay lets you perform secure payments online — for free.”

Home Builder (not released yet) - Users drag and drop furniture into a room.

Thanks to Adobe for giving away 2 copies of Flex Builder 3 Pro to the attendees.

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2 Responses to “Flex on Facebook”

  1. Mike Potter Says:
    February 24th, 2008 at 6:13 pm

    Steven Shongrunden has done a lot of work with Flex and Facebook - http://www.hybridhacking.com/

    Mike

  2. Alex Notov Says:
    February 26th, 2008 at 4:13 pm

    Mike, I didn’t come upon Steven’s site in my research for my talk.

    After reading http://hybridhacking.com/tutorials/building-facebook-applications-with-flex, I found it to be an excellent starter for those learning flex, specifically for building facebook apps!

    Great link. Thanks!

    Alex

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