I'm Flexible

I usually wait till the first point release of any software before I decide to dig into the tech behind it. Such is the case with Flex 1.5

I must say that I'm impressed. In the first day of use I was able to churn out a fairly complex prototype. The UI components are extensive enough to fit most needs and the examples excellent.

The install went as smoothly as most Macromedia installs go during the first installation as a standalone. I then ran through the technote for combining Flex into a CFMX 7 enterprise / J2EE server install, which consists of extracting the war, copying the files and combining the config files. the main installation worked fine, but the samples directions need a bit of work since some of them use JSP files. It was much easier to simply create a JRun server and then hot deploy the samples.war file.

Macromedia's main target, based on the pricing model ($12,000 to start) is the enterprise or large eCommerce store. Macromedia does offer free non-commercial flex licenses which must be applied for. Hopefully we'll see Flex hosting partners in the near future.

The Flex Builder is essentially a superset of Dreamweaver MX and if you have an existing installation of DWMX, you'll notice that they share the same resources and can't be launched at the same time. Don't delete one of your projects in FlexBuilder unless you want that project to disappear from DWMX as well. There is no upgrade path from DWMX to Flex Builder