Last night, my friend John C. Bland, II gave an amaz­ing talk on cre­at­ing Flex appli­ca­tions with Flash Builder (you should check out John’s blog if you get a chance — knowl­edge­able devel­oper, funny dude). There are some very unin­ter­est­ing details sur­round­ing the sched­ul­ing of the primer, but they essen­tially sum up to me see­ing a Flex appli­ca­tion, me being curi­ous about how it was built, me doing some Googling, me remem­ber­ing that John is pretty good with Flex, and me ask­ing a favor of him. He obliged, and what fol­lowed was great.

I don’t have Flash Builder, but now I want it. I’ve never writ­ten any­thing in Action­Script, but now I really, really want to. I use Eclipse PDT for all of my devel­op­ment (I’ll get into that a bit later) so I was already famil­iar with Flash Builder’s Eclipse-based UI and famil­iar fea­tures like code com­ple­tion and pack­ag­ing. All of those fea­tures make devel­op­ment in any lan­guage rea­son­ably enjoy­able (as enjoy­able as pro­gram­ming can be which, I guess, is actu­ally an unrea­son­able notion if you really take the task apart from some POVs); but put all of those together with some­thing as pow­er­ful and sim­ple as mxml, then add a script­ing lan­guage like Action­Script into the mix, and now you’re talk­ing about the per­fect setup for cre­at­ing engag­ing, attrac­tive, respon­sive web and desk­top appli­ca­tions in a mat­ter of min­utes. I know I’m using a ton of buzz­words, and those are prob­a­bly keep­ing you from real­iz­ing how excited I am about the idea of this thing, but try to push past all of them and real­ize that I’m actu­ally blog­ging. I’m writ­ing a blog post. About code. Any­way, go lis­ten to the talk at this URL.

Watch­ing John cruise through the devel­op­ment of a basic appli­ca­tion with Flash Builder made me real­ize how many of PDT’s fea­tures I’m not using that could poten­tially free up my time and stream­line my work­flow (buzz­words galore). I’m talk­ing mainly about work­ing sets (just never got around to look­ing into them), import­ing user libraries (never tried before — and no, I’m not a huge fan of the ginor­mous Zend Frame­work), and debug­ging (I’ve got my own debug­ging func­tions for use in the browser, but inte­grat­ing every­thing in the IDE would prob­a­bly be ben­e­fi­cial in most cases… it is, after all, an inte­grated devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment). I’m look­ing into all of these things now, and am pretty excited about what could come about as a result. I may update this blog with my new setup, if I deem it inter­est­ing enough to share.

John’s going to be doing a part 2. Check his blog for updates.