Flash Development

For assorted reasons, I need to learn Flash programming. I’m not interested in creating little movies or stuff like that - all I want is to use Flash MX like your average 4GL IDE, and then do some Flash Remoting.

I’m sorry, but the Flash MX IDE sux for developers. Why do I need to care about timelines, and having my buttons play movies (what’s with the obsession with movies, BTW?). I don’t care about timelines, or layers or frames per second.

Why can’t I put a button on a form, double click on it an see the code it calls? VB, C#.NET, Delphi and PowerBuilder all work like that - you might think that it was that way for a good reason! But NO! Macromedia now requires me to think like a designer or something.

The weird thing is that Flash MX seems to have everything an IDE needs - there is a Components pane, a Properties pane, an Actions pane and a visual form designer. They just don’t seem to work like I’d expect.

For example:

1. I put a button on a form. It appears there, and dosn’t do anything weird. Good!

2. I double click on it, and nothing happens. Not Good. But I look down, and there in the Properties pane is it says “Click Handler”. Looking Hopeful.

3. I double-click the “Click Handler” thing, and it enables me to type in the space next to it. Very Hopeful.

4. I type “testHandler” and press enter. Nothing weird happens, so I presume I have a testHandler function created. I’m getting excited now!

5. I double-click on the testHandler thing, hoping to get taken to where I can enter the code. Nothing happens. Hmmmm.

6. But wait - there is an “Actions” pane! It says “Actions for testButton (PushButton)”. Okay…

7. I press the little ”+” button, and it brings up a menu. I muck around with this for a bit, and I get some code that looks like:

   
   	onClipEvent (mouseUp) {
   	    testButton.setLabel("The Name");
   	}
   

8. I try running the movie, and pressing the button doesn’t do anything. Depressing. I muck around with the code a lot, and it still doesn’t do anything Very Depressing.

9. arhrhrhhhhh!

10. I quit in Flash MX in disgust.

Now obviously Flash can detect a button press and then do something. This means either I’m stupid, or that I’m missing some important concept that I need to understand to use Flash. I think it’s the second option (could well be wrong, though), and I guess I’ll just keep trying until I figure it out. (Don’t suggest the help - it doesn’t.)

My point is that it shouldn’t be this hard! It took me less time to figure out how to do the same thing in C/Motif than in Flash, and that (a) didn’t have an IDE, and (b) was on a AMD586, on Linux, using Lestif instead of Motif.

I think the key to it all is that “testHandler” on the button. If I could figure out where the code for that is hidden then I think I’d be okay.