https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/

Of course there are three restrictions. You must attest that you are:

1. Unemployed
2. Using it for personal use
3. Not using it for commercial or production use

UPDATE: The program was suspended, the last I looked, due to the high volume of applicants. But keep checking. You never know.

> I’ve figured out a hack that sort-of gets me there – by configuring a
> debug profile in flex builder with “about:blank” as the launch URL, I
> can hit F11 in flexbuilder, click “Debug”, close the about:blank window
> in Firefox, switch back to the running SWF, rightclick, choose
> “Debugger” and click “Connect”. But it would be much better if one could
> avoid having to do the whole F11-about:blank-closetab dance, and just
> click “Debugger->Connect” and go.
>
> For what it’s worth, this is on Linux with Firefox 3.
>
> – Frode

Thanks Frode, nice tip. You’re right, it should be an option that is much easier to do though.

The RDS view can be configured to point to any installation by using the RDS Configuation settings in the eclipse Preferences dialog.

The RDS plugin comes with all the old favorites plus the ability to generate an entire Flex 2 back-end! Did I studder? Yes, you can generate CFCs from ActionScript and ActionScript from CFCs. You can even generate CFCs from tables. This is not a “big whoop” kind of feature. I can tell it to create Active Records, Beans & DAO or even full integration with Flex Data Services.

Code generation is not one of my favorite things, but this does put you in a nice starting place.

This is all part of “Mystic”. You have to check this out!

What you are going to do is use the Flex 2 alpha and point it to the Flex 1.5 compiler. This will compile your application into a SWF, which will be put in your web site.

• Start with getting the Flex 2 alpha plug-in (either stand alone or plug-in). Follow the installation instructions, if necessary, to get Flex Builder 2 running. Once it is working, create a new Flex Project using the menu bar: File > New > Flex Project
• Now for the changes. Right-click the project that will use the Flex 1.5 compiler and select Properties. This will open the Properties dialog. In the list on of properties on the left hand side, select Builders. You are going to add a new builder and disable the existing one. When you deselect the existing ”Flex Builder” builder you will get a prompt. Just click OK.
• Click the New button to create a new builder. The configuration chooser dialog will open. Select Program and click OK.
• Now you are ready to set the new builder up. Give it a name like ”Flex 1.5”.
• Set the Location to point to the mxmlc.exe file, most likely something like this: C:\\Program Files\\Macromedia\\Flex\\bin\\mxmlc.exe
• Set the Working Directory to point to the directory holding the compiler. Something like this: C:\\Program Files\\Macromedia\\Flex\\bin\\
• And now the hard part… the arguments. Click the variables button and select the project_loc variable. This is an eclispe variable which has the absolute file system path for the project. Double-click project_loc to select that variable and close the dialog. Now append to the end of the variable the path to the main application mxml for the project. Something like this: ${project_loc}\\Main.mxml
• You need to add two more arguments; one that points to the flex-config.xml, and an output file. To do so, you will add the -configuration switch and the -o output file switch. They will look something like this: -configuration ${project_loc}\\WEB-INF\\flex\\flex-config.xml -o C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\mysite\\Main.swf

In the end the arguments will look something like this: ${project_loc}\\Main.mxml  -configuration ${project_loc}\\WEB-INF\\flex\\flex-config.xml -o C:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\mysite\\Main.swf

• One last thing I would do is run your application the old way and copy the source HTML from a dynamically created Flex site (i.e. view source from the browser). Then create a new HTML page with the HTML source you copied. Finally, change the references to the [filename].mxml.swf to your new SWF ([filename].swf)

That”s it!

Thanks again to Marcin, Sean and Tony for sharing with me.

Top 10 List:

1. With the new code model, search, refactoring, auto-complete you will code 3X faster
2. The application Profiler will allow you to see and tune memory and performance\r\n
   • You will learn so much about coding in AS3 from this it”s unreal
3. Compiles faster!
4. Maintain projects across SDKs, 2.01, 3.0, and onward (YES!!!)
5. You will be able to build AIR applications and debug them seamlessly\r\n
   • Easily turn Flex applications into Desktop applications
6. You will be able to work with Web Services (SOAP) using strong typing
7. Get new advanced data visualization components (AdvancedDataGrid, TreeDataGrid) and hierarchical data providers
   • Components that we had to build in the past
8. Enhanced design view for pixel perfect layout and advanced constraints\r\n
   • Coders, don”t knock this. Try it out and you”ll see the benefits real quick
9. Skinning and styling from Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, PhotoShop\r\n
   • This is awesome!! Quickly and easily bring comps in directly from the design tools
10. Seamless support for Flex Framework Caching RSLs ( smaller FX swf files )

Now if that”s not convincing enough, you don”t know Flex!