A lot of information on the web is aimed at people who use flashdevelop and other guis to build flex apps, this article is aimed at developers. I'll give you the information to get started with flex development quickly, using the free sdk and building with ant from the commandline.
A passing knowledge of ant wouldn't hurt either.
This tutorial uses the file blankapp.zip to help bootstrap you into the world of flex / actionscript development.
Prerequisites
Flex SDK
You will need the flex sdk available from the flex developer center
Apache ant
You will need apache ant, make sure that the bin folder is in your path.
Copy flexTasks.jar from the flex ant lib into your own ant lib folder.
Setup
Extract the blankapp.zip to a folder
Open build.xml and change the line <property name="FLEX_HOME" value="/usr/flex/sdk3" /> to point to the flex sdk.
Build
You can build it by typing
ant build
You should see some output like this
Buildfile: build.xml
clean:
[delete] Deleting directory C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build
init:
[mkdir] Created dir: C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build
build:
[mxmlc] Loading configuration file C:\usr\flex\sdk3\frameworks\flex-config.xml
[mxmlc] Initial setup: 172ms
[mxmlc] Loaded 8 SWCs: 391ms
[mxmlc] C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\src\blankapp_333027.cache (The system cannot
find the file specified)
[mxmlc] Files: 328 Time: 1562ms
[mxmlc] Linking... 16ms
[mxmlc] Optimizing... 125ms
[mxmlc] SWF Encoding... 47ms
[mxmlc] C:\Documents and Settings\Stuart\Desktop\projects\flex\blankapp\build\blankapp.swf (159158 bytes)
[mxmlc] Persisting 33 compilation units... 15ms
[mxmlc] Total time: 2328ms
[mxmlc] Peak memory usage: 59 MB (Heap: 33, Non-Heap: 26)
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds
A new file, blankapp.swf should now be in the build folder
Type
ant deploy
To copy it to the deploy directory (later you can customise this later).
If you open the blankapp.swf in the browser you should see something like this
{: .alignnone
.size-medium .wp-image-130 width="232"
height="208"}
It's fairly bare, but demonstrates some basic techniques and a couple of widgets.
Mxml and Actionscript, how they link together
There are two important parts, the blankapp.mxml and org/blankapp/BlankApp.as.
The mxml file defines the layout while the actionscript contains code to be executed. In this case there is one mxml file, BlankApp.mxml which links to a single actionscript class, BlankApp (in the file src/org/blankapp/BlankApp.as).
The directory structure org/blankapp, defines the package, in much the same way as java packages.
The graphic below shows how the class is linked to the mxml and where the instance of the class is:
{: .alignnone
.size-full .wp-image-131 width="666"
height="822"}
The app is very basic, but should provide a jumping off point.
Adding libraries
If you need to add any libraries, just place the swc files in the lib folder and they will be included, the build.xml can be changed if this isn't satisfactory.
Afterword
I only wanted to get started with papervision, but found it a bit of hassle to get started, hopefully this post will help people get started quickly.
Acknowledgements
The ant build file is by no means my own, owes inspiration to previous ant files I've known, including the pyAMF one and information available on the web.
This blog entry: http://talsma.tv/post.cfm/ant-mxmlc-and-swc-files for the info on how to include swc files.