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I’ve been doing more flex testing, and my initial impression is it is faster than my expectations. I did at least 7 different K-means tests with it, and tried to implement some image processing algorithms including edge detection, gradients, blurring and it is not slow.

However, flex does not have multithreading, which makes 1. makes it harder to do longer processing 2. makes it impossible to distribute the load across CPU cores. As a result, I had to implement a timer that calls a function every small interval, and inside that function I broke my processing into smaller pieces, and had to implement several states and switch between them. It actually made my implementation much more difficult and more sophisticated. I hope that at one point Adobe will add multithreading.

I think adobe made a perfect recipe by throwing the flex sdk as open source. Morever, it is platform independent as the compiler is in java. The last couple of weekends I put some time to see what’s there. I was able to make a simple dev environment with emacs both on windows and on Linux.

Coding flex on linux seemed to be easier than on windows (at least for me). One big thing is the results of the trace command, which appear on the console on linux but are piped to some hidden file in windows that I have to keep refreshing to know what’s going on inside my code!

I’ve testing flex to see how far can it go in image processing and in image undersanding. I think that flex has lots of opportunities, at least better than java when it comes to online apps. The reason that I personally don’t like java for applets is the big memory footprint of its runtime environment, and that strange big delay when it loads, which makes it a very discouraging solution when compared to adobe’s flash.

Since I was fiddeling with bitmaps and bitmapdata, and after some tests – nothing was working. It turns out that the Flex’s help it written assuming that your developing flash – they like copied it from their old docs, without changing the examples. See here & my comment at the bottom:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/BitmapData.html

So if it happens that you want to display flex objects using the addChild function, make sure you call the addChild on a UIComponent & not any other flex object, as they won’t recognize bitmaps or other dynamically created objects. I just added one in the mxml file:

<mx:UIComponent id="myUIComponent" />

Also read here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders@yahoogroups.com/msg77440.html

I’ve been playing around with flex for a while now. I was able to setup a compile environment under liux using emacs, a Makefile.

I also found a mode for emacs to highlight actionscript 3 files here. It missed a hook, which will automatically set the actionscript-mode if a file of extension .as was loaded & could not find a way to comment on their blog, so it’s here for reference.

(setq auto-mode-alist (cons ‘(”\\.as$” . actionscript-mode) auto-mode-alist))