Is Flash or Flex better to build a user interactiv

Question

i want to see if these "build a . . ." flash sites (to support a user customized ordering process) are done using regular flash or Flex?

1. Site 1
2. Site 2
3. Site 3
4. Site 4

All of these "walk a user" through a customized ordering process and capture all of their selection and showing them all of their customizations (and ultimately bring them to a final ordering screen).

What's going on under the hood on these sites and are built in flash or flex? Is the person creating a separate image for every combination that you could possibly select or is something else happening here?

I still can't figure out if Flex or Flash is better for something like this. (why does adobe make these seemingly basic questions so complicated)

Are there any good resource or tutorials for try to build this type of functionality in flash on a website?

Answer 1

When i start - my 1st choose were Flash Professional, coming with Adobe CS's packs. It is not bad option for a just new programmer, as well it does offer "the creative approach". But a bit short u would like probably to get more control over your code, as well with growing your knowledge into the source, and object-oriented programming you will probably start looking for something which will provide you more power into exchange to creativity, then jumping into Flex probably will happen :).

My suggestion is :

• Start with Flash Professional CS5.5
• Learn about the timeline
• Events
• Objects
• Action Script 3 ( keep away from Action Script 2 )
• Classes
• Transitions

This will probably done your project. when you are ready with all of this, you will be probably ready to jump into deeper waters, and Flex will awaits you there to rebuild up to one fully growth project.

Then maybe you will start thinking about storing your user settings and changes he made, this is the server side, which will open you another super large and funny world to explore and understand. :)

.. just an add - just check the Youtube videos about doing things with Flash Professional. it will be really good powerup. :)

here some tools which u might more than enjoy into the process of creating things for Flash platform :

• Flash Professional CS5.5
• Flash Builder 4.5 ( Flex )
• Photoshop CS5.5

• Ilustrator CS5.5

• 3DS MAX 2010 ( for some super cool looking 3D models ) ;)

Answer 2

The first site you linked is especially quite nice - you can tell the programmer put alot of work into it.

Have you worked on Flash before? The reason I am asking is because it is quite a different beast - requires both left and right brain to fully grasp. If you are just starting and want to build a site similar to the ones you linked then I will recommend 'pure' Flash with CS4 (or 5 if you can afford it). Reason being that Flex (now called Flash Builder - no confusion there haha), is really geared towards building form based websites. Yes, you can build other Flash type animations in there but its much harder to do (well), than just using Creative Studio.

Now, you might find that you eventually want or need to use Flex, but trust me you can build an entire web page with just Creative Studio complete with interaction and complex navigations. Here are some sites that may help you in your task (which is a large one btw!):

• http://tutorials.flashmymind.com/ (Mostly for nice looking effects and slick interface)
• http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/ (Tons of tutorials on lots of different areas of Flash).

The second site has alot of tutorials for things you will need, like how to build menu items and buttons, and also how to handle user interaction (mouse moves, drags, key clicks etc). Your also going to need to know ALOT of ActionScript. Here's a good reference for that:

• The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide

It's unfortunate you cannot use HTML 5 for this project. Making a major investment in learning Flash seems like a waste of time to me. But hopefully the links provided help you in this task and please make a comment if you need more info.

Answer 3

Hm, I still don't really like any of the answers, so I'm going to chime in.

First question is "What's the difference between Flash and Flex?". At their core, they're one of the same. There is some confusion between Flash the platform (Flash Player) and Flash the tool (Flash CS); there's also Flash Builder which is a development environment made to develop in pure Actionscript or Flex. The Flash Player uses Actionscript to display what you need or you can use Flash CS to create visually what you want to show. In my opinion, don't use Flash CS unless you need a drawing/animation tool (which I don't think you do). With that said, the real question should be "What's the difference between Actionscript and Flex"? Well, there is none from a technical standpoint since Flex is made with Actionscript. What matters here is that Flex is a framework that's made for rapid rich internet application implementation. It uses the concept of layouts, skinning and styling as well as standard components (buttons, comboboxes, labels, datagrids, etc) to help you create striking applications easily and quickly. You could do the same thing in Actionscript, but would take you longer to implement the same thing, however the end application would be a lot leaner and quicker to download (normally).

Second question is "Should I be used Flex or Actionscript to create my ordering wizard?" which is the one I think you should really concentrate on. The answer is "it depends on your requirements". What Flex is really good at is a clear and concise codebase using development tools meant for user interfaces. If your ordering wizard is going to be fairly complex and/or data driven you should probably use Flex since it will give you tools to create it faster as well as make it easily changeable later. However, if the wizard is very simple and just needs to be implemented once, there's no reason why you can't use Actionscript to do it.

I hope this was helpful.

Answer 4

Short answer is to take best from both of them.

And here is a short story, which describe how big Flash project could be done.

Company receive order for a project X, and there are two departments are going to work on it, D (Designers who are going to create all fancy graphic for the project) and P (Programmers who are going to input some life into the lifeless design).

While guys from the P department drinking bear in the basement and creating data model for the project X, configuring software, and doing all routine stuff that are need to be done before starting a new project. Guys from the D department open Flash which is familiar for them, as they spent all their life in Ps,Ai and other Adobe products. (Flash is good, really good, if you want to play with a graphic objects. Move them left or right, add some fancy effects, create animation and stuff like that. Creating graphical objects for the future Flash project inside the Flash IDE is more natural.).

Nobody from the D department had never write a line of code, so when they finish creating first part of graphical assets they just compile this to the .swc file and pass it to the P department, where good fellows already start to wrote some code inside Flash Builder which is looks familiar for them, as they spent a lot amount of time coding with different programming languages inside Eclipse based IDE.

So in the end the project X, is nicely separated into the two parts: graphical assets which are created inside Flash - which was designed for creating animation, and graphic, and code which is written inside Flash Builder, which was specifically designed for this, because Flash wasn't really good for writing big amount of code.

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Coming back to reality and your particular projects. I would suggest to create all screens(steps of customised ordering process) inside Flash, add a linkage for every MovieClips in the library(for the future use with action script). And after import those objects into your pure action script project. In this case you can have generic action script which you will use in different projects (as they are definitely would have some common parts). So you can reuse one code, and just change graphical assets for the different project.

In a case if you want to use only one tool Flash or Flash Builder(for coding Flex or Flash) in my opinion you should choose Flash Builder. Managing code inside it is a just a one pleasure, and I'm not sure if managing code is something that could be applied to the Flash.