4. Creating Apps

Most of the time it takes to build an application is in the setup.

Imagine if you had a computer sitting in the corner with an application environment already installed and ready to develop your application. It has specifically been designed and configured to compile your application. When you click on the magic button, it does exactly that! Wouldn't that be easy?

Well, there are many different types of applications. So, there are different types of development environments. If someone actually configured a computer as I described above, it would probably generate similar applications. What's the point of that? Games! Games! Games! That's right, and there is an application development environment that is designed to generate games. Most games generally act the same. So, a company called Unity Technologies, created a "turn-key" solution for building games. It is a high end, packaged solution with a high end price tag, see Unity3D.

If you can afford Unity3D and you are building a game, it is a very good solution. But, if you do not have thousands of dollars to spend, this might not be an option.

Design your development environment based on your app

If you are not building a game or do not want to pay the Unity high end price tag then you need to take the time to setup your own development environment with Apache Flex.

Imagine having a great car engine without a car body. Well, that is what Apache Flex is. It is a great engine to create multi-platform apps. But like a car, it needs a "body" to work. If you look inside the car, you will see a bunch of buttons and knobs to control the engine and stuff. Well, the body for a compiler is similar and is called a "code editor".

There are two popular Apache Flex code editors; one is free and one is not. Both include everything you need to compile multi-platform applications.

Flash Develop:  www.flashdevelop.org
Pro: Free and easy setup.
Con: No easy iPhone, Android, or Blackberry output.

Flash Builder:  www.adobe.com
Pro: Easy setup. 
Con: $699 or $50 a month for all Adobe products.

Flash builder is the easiest to get up and running fast. 

There are also other code editors in addition to the two listed above, including Flash Professional. 

A development environment requires many things including a code editor, a server, MVC libraries, release build scripts, online repository and automated test projects. 

Keep tuned.. In my future blogs, I will go over the details of installing, configuring and compiling apps using both development environments. 


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