Hey all,
I'm looking to be able to run some actionscript 3 in the background to handle some audio and build a javascript front-end. I heard that you can simply compile actionscript 3 and run it using the flex framework, but I'm new to all of this and am not really sure the difference between flex and actionscript. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks! Matt Mueller
Yes, you can achieve this using actionscript. And Flex is a framework for developing flash applications which requires coding in Actionscript. Flex api is extension to actionscript's tandard API with lots of built-in functionalities like drawing charts, handling videos etc.
If you are just looking for handling some audio in the background then you can just use actionscript with Flash IDE. But you are looking to build a full fledged GUI with lots of functionality then yes, you should have a look at Flex as it provides lots of built-in libraries.
Flex is a framework for developing data-driven flash SWFs. It lets you create gui using the markup language mxml (similar to html, but with a strict syntax) and has a lot of inbuilt UI components like Button, Panel, ComboBox, Datagrid etc.
The flex compiler, mxmlc.exe, can compile both flex projects and normal actionscript projects (that doesn't use any flex components).
If you are looking for just the audio functionalities of Flash, you need not use Flex, pure AS3 would suffice. Download the Flex SDK and compile the ClassName.as file using the mxmlc.exe