I was recently spammed with an advertisement announcing the release of Adobe's Flex Builder 3 beta.  I've played with Adobe's flex framework some before in the past, but had a renewed interest to learn Flex.

The Flex SDK is open-source, but the command line compiler is a real pain.  Their $400 flex builder plugin for Eclipse makes developing in the Flex environment a thousand times easier.  Unfortunately, their spiffy flex builder is out of my budget so I'm using a 30-day trial.

Flex Feed Reader

Provided you have Flash 9 (sorry Windows only at the moment), you should be seeing this blog via an atom feed reader I wrote in flex.  It's kind of in its early stages of development, but the basics are there.  It reads in the atom feed of the blog and lists it's entries on the left. Clicking an entry displays it on the right.

Flex Framework 

The UI components of the MXML language are actually rather amazing.  They make rendering components like panels, windows, lists, and simpler controls like buttons and text fields extremely easy.  The framework really forces you to use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.  All UI is constructed using MXML (although they can be build dynamically with actionscript), all function is handled via Actionscript 3.0.  The model is almost always external and usually in XML (E4X) format.  I haven't dug too deep into its frameworks for handling and working with databases, but my first impression is that it is their intention for you to use another web development language as an interface.  For example, you could use Flex to place a request to a php file that would place the database request, render XML and return it to the flex app.  Perhaps a little overhead there, but it does allow for consistency.  It also makes it so the Flex application doesn't have to worry too much about the data model.

Eitherway, Flex has a lot of potential to revolutionize how we develop and deliver rich internet applications.  Flex applications are compiled to byte code and can actually utilize system resources like the video card that other web development languages delivering XHTML and Javascript can't match.  The drawback is that some Flex applications can get large and would require some download/loading time.