I have to say i have never been an man of making GUI (graphical user interfaces) and the only reason why not is, because it took a lot of time to create everything I wanted. I haven’t build any GUI application since 2 years (most apps where online application or command line so didn’t need any gui). I have played around with J2ME for creating mobile applications and there GUI but was not impressed by the tooling and the way of making the GUI. Besides J2ME I have worked with Flash, .NET, WEB(HTML) and some other options for creating online and offline user interfaces. Although I could make everything I wanted with every of those languages and frameworks I came across, I was never really satisfied.

In my opinion there is to much hassle at creating GUI, you needed to code too much to get things working or you lack of coding so you can’t do everything. I do have to say that I am not an expert on building GUI but just a programmer who also sometimes has to build an GUI.

Last couple of days I tried Adobe Flex and I must say I am very very pleased with the things I could do with it. I am not saying that Flex is the best here I am just expressing my opinion. But I do think if I had to make an nice, fancy, good lucking, interactive GUI I would probably use Flex for an online and offline application. I would also mix it with other languages to improve functionality.

Although I have played with Flex right now and I like it I am going to find some time to try out the GWK (Google web kit) and JavaFX. Because I think those two could make me change my opinion, at least JavaFX could do that, I am skeptical about GWK.

For those who like to start with Flex or need help here are some sites and my opinion about them.

1) Adobe has a good resource of samples and guidelines that helped me very much. If you are a programmer I would say skip the (Flex in a Week and the Getting Started Experience) and just go for the Quick Starts. There you can find very useful samples. I would recommend to go trough those because they will help you on the long run when you start doing/designing and trying to code your own project.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/

2) Very useful online API of Flex 3. Besides explanation of the API most of the times it also contains an sample.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/class-summary.html

3) At this site you can find a lot of samples.

http://blog.flexexamples.com/

The last thing I would like to say is that I started working with flex 3 but at the end ended up working with an version 4 because I needed some file handling on the client side. The options I needed where only available at Flex 4 and Flash player 10.

Have fun creating GUI like it’s suppose to be!