I blogged earlier on this blog about my interest in Adobe Flex, because I had started to look into it as a result of Seesmic using Flex. To my surprise, Mike Potter left a comment offering me the tools to get started with Adobe Flex.
Well, I’m happy to report that I received them today. What came is O’Reilly’s Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential)
I researched Adobe Flex back in the day, but ended up using straight PHP. (for the geeks in the audience, I’m using the Zend Framework now on my personal stuff) After reading the wikipedia entry and the flex.org website, it looks like it has come a long way, and some pretty high traffic sites use it. And yes, I’m fully aware that Seesmic is labeled as pre-alpha, but in reality, the amount of users says it is more of a beta.
Well, I can see that Flex *should* be able to handle what Seesmic throws at it. I’ve used Coldfusion in the past as well, and Coldfusion just struck me as a too simplified to get real work done, perhaps that has come a long way too.
One of the points that Flex has that makes me think it could possibly be enterprise ready is that you can use Java EE with it. Java of course has it’s ups and downs, and I’ve certainly shared in the joy and pain when coding in Java, but this give me hope for Flex.
So after doing this research, I’m definitely interested in working on some projects with Adobe Flex. It has potential. And as a guy that tends to code back ends, and leave the front end to the graphically non-challenged, Flex seems to create a nice front end, even when you don’t really have those genes. 
Just look at my header on this blog. Anyway, I’m always looking to learn new things, and Flex looks like a great one, although, I think it will be pretty easy to pick up.