Mihai Corlan, one of Adobe’s platform evangelists, has written a “rather exhaustive introduction to programming in Flex”:http://corlan.org/flex-for-php-developers/, specifically for current PHP developers.
bq. When I did my first web project using Flex, boy oh boy, it was quite a switch! The clean separation between the client and the server, (the business logic on the client side in addition to business logic on the server side), client-side technology that is compiled instead of interpreted, two languages on the client, all these required a different mind-set from traditional web development. And this is my reason for writing this article. I want to share with you some of the things that are specific to Flex in relation to PHP. At the same time I want to introduce Flex by comparing it with PHP whenever this comparison makes sense.
He goes on to say that the point of this article is *not* to attempt to convert PHP users over to Flex. But simply that he sees “Flex”:http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ and PHP as choosing the ‘right tool for the job’ for different tasks.
This seems to be a great resource if you’ve been looking at adding Flex to your repertoire as a programmer either for fun or as part of a work project. The fact that it’s written to draw directly on your PHP experience makes it a must read for current PHP folks.
August 19, 2009 at 1:39 am
In my humble opinion, every developer should know several languages including us web guys whom know php and javascript already. Knowing multiple languages not only makes you a much more valuable asset to a company and will probably help with your job security, but also, a language is just a tool that we carry in our mental tool chest. Php and js granted are extremely powerful, but there are times when a task is much to difficult or even impossible with just php/js. Flex is an extremely power language that every developer should definitely consider adding it to their own tool chest.
August 19, 2009 at 1:59 am
Given the fact that there’s quite a lot of PHP developers out there who develop on linux, I’d expect it to be nothing but reasonable if they started putting serious effort in a linux version of flexbuilder. They however seem to have stopped that for over a year ago :’(