Thursday, November 11, 2010

Tour de Flex SDK – What is the Flex SDK?

The following is a video tutorial that answers the age-old question, "What is the Flex SDK?"

Whenever I interview someone for a dev position on the phone, that's the first question I ask. If the interviewee starts talking about FlashBuilder (which happens more often than I'd like), then I try to figure out the fastest way to politely end our conversation. :)

I hope I don't come off as a jerk in that last paragraph, but it's vitally important to me that my team understands the fundamentals of how our builds work.

You can watch this video in the player below or just download it here to watch however you'd like:



*update - I just watched the video and realized I missed a couple pieces:

1. Anything that starts with "a" in the "bin" folder is just the AIR version of the tool (e.g. amxmlc is the AIR version of mxmlc)
2. the "asdoc" folder in the root contains html templates that the "asdoc" tool uses.
3. the "lib" folder has the .jars that the "bin" tools point to
4. there's a "fontswf" tool in the "bin" folder that will compile fonts into a swf
5. all those "-manifest" files in the "frameworks" folder are used to map classes to a namespace so namespaces like "xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" will use the correct classes.

2 comments:

  1. digitladave9:42 AM

    it might have been really nice if you showed how you can compile a font into a swf and a few other command line things in the sdk, would show that the sdk is more then just a reference but can be a tool.

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