Daemian Mack home

Flex and AIR

March 28, 2008

Every so often a certain awesome VP drops in and gives me something fun to do; last Monday I inherited a Flex/AIR app used to help convert what I’ll euphemise as ‘critical customer assets’ from an old codeline to a new one. This gives me a chance to play with a whole bunch of new things I’ve never had the excuse to before…

Flex is particularly cool because bundled with AIR, it lets you take web-centric UI concepts and apply them to desktop applications. Out of the box, the GUI builder is easier to work with and creates prettier interfaces than just about any other GUI toolkit I’ve played with. You can use CSS rules to style the appearance and layout.

Flex/Eclipse tip. The following error…

initial content not found

is probably due to your having mucked up the workspace\[PROJECT_NAME]\.actionScriptProperties file. In my case, a libraryPathEntry had gone missing. (Google has yet to learn this trick, which would have saved a piece of my Friday.)

In short, restore from an Eclipse project backup or regenerate a new project.