being flexible

At work this week, I moved to a new group where the development environment is Adobe Flex. It is a breath of fresh air for me. Today it all became fun when I had a bug in my code and could acutally set a breakpoint and debug the code. For the past several years this simple process was torture. Found a bug in JavaScript? Good luck on finding where it is. Bug in JSP code, have fun finding it. Will an interactive debugger help? I am sorry it should be easy but it is not. Even using IE developer toolbar or Firefox Firebug it just seems like too much work to find a little bug. The best thing about Flex is the UI components, but it is the small things in life that make being a developer enjoyable in the daily trenches.

For the last couple of weeks at home on my Mac, I have been learning Flex by completely rewriting my Attentive 2 Design personal web site in Flex. I covered some of the things that I had always wanted to do in DHTML but never was able to get them working in all browsers. A custom dialog with clickable content, drop shadows, show/hiding content on mouse events. I used Flex Builder 3which was a great Adobe decision by making it work within Eclipse, since that is the development IDE of choice for Java for many years. I am looking forward to having fun again after many years.