About
The Los Angeles Flex Users Group is a group of professionals and enthusiasts who work with or are interested in learning more about Flex.
We hold monthly meetings where a presenter will give a detailed explanation of some aspect of Flex while everyone else gets to eat pizza and drink beer.
The group is informal, anyone may join and we charge nothing.
If you want to be notified of announcement about upcoming meetings and other Flex and LAFlex related events, sign up to the LAFlex Google Group.
What’s Flex?
Flex is a technology that lets you create rich internet applications very quickly. Flex can run on a huge portion of web clients because it sits on top of Flash, which it uses as its runtime. If you’re familiar with Java, think of the Flash runtime as the JVM, and Flex as a very powerful and easy to use framework that runs on this VM. Flash is available on Windows, OS X, and Linux, so it works on all the major consumer platforms. It also runs and feels the same on all platforms, so you really only have to write once and run everywhere. It also works the same on all browsers, because it runs inside Flash. Flex is truly cross-platform.
How Much Does Flex Cost?
Nothing: The Flex compiler and debugger are FREE. Just like you can download the Java SDK for free, so can you download the Flex SDK for free and start writing programs right away. If you’re up to it, you can make do with TextMate, VI, or NotePad and your command line. But many of us like to code with specialized editors that automate tasks for us and provide visual aids while programming, and for that we use Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Adobe provides an IDE called Flex Builder (currently in Beta 3). Flex builder 2 currently costs $249 per seat. It is based on the Eclipse editor, so if you are a Java developer who has used Eclipse you’ll feel right at home.
