RIAs: beginning the Adobe Flex Development Guide

Some years ago, a friend told me about something called 'Flex'. I must tell you that I'm talking about Adobe Flex, because then I thought he was talking about Flex, very nice for language processing, but we aren't interested (at this moment) in defining regular expressions for deterministic grammars; I'd like to talk about developing RIAs, Rich Internet Applications, that kind of web applications with a great look and feel, seeming to be desktop ones.

There are other technologies, like Silverlight or JavaFX. I have seen some examples of the first one and It left me a very good impression; I have programmed a simple application with Java FX and I think It's not very mature... I don't have much time for investigating, so I'll ask you here your opinion. I have learned many things about Adobe Flex and I find it very interesting. If you don't know this technology, It's worth to take a second to visit the flex store sample application.

Further than simply (¿simply?) learning a new technology, I have always been interested on optimizing and systematizing the development process with that technology, and constructing an architecture that minimizes the effort for programming the required funcionality and providing cross services to satisfy non functional requisites easily.

Well, recently I had the idea of writing a development guide for Flex; this way, I think I will also improve my knowledges about this technhology. I'll like sharing this experience with you, and I ask you to join and participate actively, asking your doubts, making suggestions and correcting my mistakes. The purpose of the Flex Development Guide is to define the steps for perfoming all the tasks in the development of an Adobe Flex application, from the requisite specification to the deployment in a production environment. And much more, like the steps for preparing a workstation for a developer. It's quite ambitious but I'll do it step by step and with your help, I hope.

I think this guide will be interesting for people...

• Who is starting to learn Flex, beacuse It should allow a person who doesn't have Flex knowledges to develop a Flex Application easily.
• Who has some knowledges about Flex, because It should give them a global sight of the development process and suggest them best practices to be added to their development process.
• Who knows Flex very well, because it should help them to systematize the steps for the development of a Flex Application.

All this stuff sounds great. I'm wondering know if I will be able to achieve someting similar to this... Well, these are the goals at this time, let's try to achieve them. I have just published a first version at my site: http://sites.google.com/site/josemartinezbenavides/, in the IT / Dev / RIAs section. This document is almost empty; it just describes the configuration of a development workstation. The last section of the guide is called weaknesses; there I'll write down some features that should be improved.

Regards!


The questions:

• The technology: Is Adobe Flex the best alternative for developing RIAs?
• The IDE: Do you know an open source IDE for developing Adobe Flex applications? Do you think we could build one?? In that case, what technology will you use for developing a Flex development IDE? Flex too??