Flex Remembered

I just had the absolutely horrible experience pleasure of using Flex again.  For details why, check Appcelerant in the next few days.  However, there were a few things that I couldn’t help but get off my chest.

• The documentation sucks, especially for their command line tools.   I will readily admit that this is partially my fault, but I don’t quite understand the relationship between ActionScript, MXML and Flex. I spent about a day just getting bogged down in figuring out what I need to get things done.  
• Related to above, there aren’t enough good examples.  At least on pages that are easily accessible for free, there wasn’t very much actual code that was helpful.  Most of what I was presented with, I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
• Flex/Flash (Flesh?) is actually quite good when you want to do something visually snazzy.  It should be used in these cases.
• ActionScript is adequate when you don’t know Javascript.  However, it is piss poor when you get accustomed to the power stemming from javascript’s dynamic nature.  It’s not long before you really start to miss things such as being able to bind variables to a function that will be called by an event handler.  
• c.verticalScrollPolicy = ScrollPolicy.off; c.horizontalScrollPolicy = ScrollPolicy.off; Are the most crucial lines when it comes to developing in Flex.  Otherwise, Flex will put ugly scrollbars oneverything.
• The Flex-Ajax Bridge is really cool. While this does suffer from the same documentation pitfall as Flex proper, the bridge is really neat.  The biggest benefit is that it allows a developer to use Flex for it’s strengths (snazzy visuals, scrollbars, etc) and use something else for the rest.
• You can’t index a Flash Movie.  If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.  

Flex is not something that I want to use everyday, nor something that I would use to build a significant potion of a website.  It’s useful for little visual effects and flashy things.  Otherwise, you’re better off learning how to use CSS.  The web is still the best technology for delivering web applications.