Flash, Flex, Flare, Flaw? (Say this 10 times fast)

Starting this project armed with 5-year-old knowledge of Flash proved to be more of a challenge than starting fresh. Despite this, I am actually glad that Flash has changed so dramatically in the last few years because I was initially dreading developing with Actionscript on the IDE provided by Flash. Perhaps it was the concept of linking code to specific frames in animation and not having a coherent way of managing such code; or perhaps it was Actionscript being such a primitive and messy language that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have built any serious applications with it. In either case, it seems I was not the only one who had these gripes because Actionscript 3.0 and Flex 3 were a quantum leap in allowing developers to build and maintain complex applications in Flash. Surely, this magnitude of change couldn’t have been possible without many angry emails and blog posts from disgruntled developers. As I was reading the books on the subject, I kept reminiscing about just how awkward some of the implementations were in the previous versions of Flash/Actionscript. Fortunately for me, this nostalgia only served as a minor distraction since I do agree with most of the changes and additions (unlike my generic journey from Java 1.4 to 1.5). Nevertheless, I would imagine someone with no prior Flash experience would have a slight advantage over me with learning this stuff. Wenbing probably may want to comment on this.

With my newly restored faith in Flash+Flex development, I am looking forward to the finished product in a few months. I am also excited about doing some nifty things with Flare, but too bad the first milestone of this project doesn’t require it. I am actually a tad bit concerned that Flare is still in alpha. Call it a superstition, but I haven’t had good experiences with early iterations of software with names beginning with “FL” (except maybe Flickr beta, but it wasn’t really a beta anyways). For the sake of this project, let’s hope this superstition has as much truth in it as my horoscopes.