Flex 3 course: Developing Rich Internet Applications

In the first week of December I did the course “Flex 3: Developing Rich Internet Applications” with Prisma IT near Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It is a combination of two separate courses: “Flex 3: Developing Rich Client Applications” and “Flex 3 and LiveCycle Data Services: Integrating with Data and Messaging“. And I am quite proud to present my certificate… as I do not know that much doctors who are quite serious into programming and software development themselves. To be honest, in neurosurgery I don’t know any (other) of them…

I really liked the Flex 3 course. Although I had some experience with Flex and ActionScript from the NeuroCards application and reading some books, the course was:

1. Good to refresh my knowledge
2. Very good for some tips and tricks you don’t learn from books
3. Excellent to discuss some broader topics on programming

Before I went to the course, I was really in doubt whether I should focus on learning Java for web development with the Google Web Toolkit, or expand my knowledge on Flex and ActionScript. After some discussion with professional programmers who worked with all of them, I am confident that staying with Adobe’s techniques is the right decision for now.

Flex offers better tools for visualization, call it infographics if you want. And as a MD in neurosurgery, I truly believe (and experienced!) the benefits of mindmapping to combine “left hemisphere learning” with “right hemisphere learning”. Besides, the ability to deploy both for the web (although it requires the Flash plugin, but it’s installed at most computers) and all desktop platforms (using Adobe AIR) is very attractive.

The one thing I am curious about, is whether FlashBuilder 4 (the new Flex IDE in development) will support iPhone development with ActionScript, as is published for Flash CS5. Oh wait, Adobe Labs has a post on this: in 2010 we can expect a mobile Flex framework called Slider (whitepaper) that may work on iPhone as well. Because I do not like the timeframe-approach from Flash, I really prefer Flex… but maybe we can work with pure ActionScript from within Flex?

Anyway, I am curious on this… currently I am finishing my first iPhone application and then I will quickly round up the second one. Then I am really looking forward to start working in Flex again, it’s just a lot cleaner than the iPhone SDK where DRY seems to be a way of life… as you notice, I do not like the different @interface (*.h) and @implementation (*.m) approach. And although I understand why memory management is useful here, I am not really fond of it either! ;-)