Adobe Flex is an umbrella term for a group of technologies initially released in March of 2004 by Macromedia to support the development and deployment of rich Internet applications based on their proprietary Macromedia Flash platform.
Traditional application programmers found it challenging to adapt to the animation metaphor upon which the Flash Platform was originally built. Flex seeks to minimize this problem by providing a workflow and programming model that is familiar to application developers.
The goal of Flex is to allow Web application developers to quickly and easily build rich Internet applications. In a multi-tiered model, Flex applications serve as the presentation tier.
Flex features development of graphic user interfaces using an XML-based language called MXML. Flex comes with various components and features that make capabilities such as web services, remote objects, drag and drop, sortable columns, charting/graphing, built in animation effects, and other interface interactions simple. Since the client only loads once, application workflow is significantly improved versus HTML based applications (eg. PHP, ASP, JSP, CFMX) which require executing templates on the server with every action. Flex's language and file structure are seeking to decouple application logic from design.
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