I think adobe made a perfect recipe by throwing the flex sdk as open source. Morever, it is platform independent as the compiler is in java. The last couple of weekends I put some time to see what’s there. I was able to make a simple dev environment with emacs both on windows and on Linux.
Coding flex on linux seemed to be easier than on windows (at least for me). One big thing is the results of the trace command, which appear on the console on linux but are piped to some hidden file in windows that I have to keep refreshing to know what’s going on inside my code!
I’ve testing flex to see how far can it go in image processing and in image undersanding. I think that flex has lots of opportunities, at least better than java when it comes to online apps. The reason that I personally don’t like java for applets is the big memory footprint of its runtime environment, and that strange big delay when it loads, which makes it a very discouraging solution when compared to adobe’s flash.
Since I was fiddeling with bitmaps and bitmapdata, and after some tests – nothing was working. It turns out that the Flex’s help it written assuming that your developing flash – they like copied it from their old docs, without changing the examples. See here & my comment at the bottom:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/BitmapData.html
So if it happens that you want to display flex objects using the addChild function, make sure you call the addChild on a UIComponent & not any other flex object, as they won’t recognize bitmaps or other dynamically created objects. I just added one in the mxml file:
<mx:UIComponent id="myUIComponent" /> Also read here: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders@yahoogroups.com/msg77440.html