Disadvantages of a Flex project vs an Actionscript project?
actionscript, apache-flex
Solution
- If you're developing a game, you should be using an ActionScript project. Flex is to be used only for data driven applications and user interfaces.
- The flex compiler generates a lot of intermediate code to convert mxml files into actionscript (you can view those files if you compile with `-keep` compiler option). This code, the flex framework incorporated to your SWF, adds significantly to the size.
- Create an actionscript project with a textfield ("hello world") and a flex project with a label with the same text. Build them, go to their bin-debug folders and compare the file sizes. While actionscript one is only a couple of kilobytes, flex swf would be at least a 100 kB.
- As far as speed is concerned, since the flex framework is sitting on top of actionscript, it obviously would have a performance downside.
- The beauty of flex lies in the easiness to create UI components and developing data driven applications that frequently communicates with the server.
- Don't use it unless you truly need it.
Problem
I've recently started making a game in FlexBuilder. The game is currently a Flex project. Is there any downside to using Flex as opposed to just Actionscript? A friend of a friend told me that Flex is slower than an Actionscript project. I've been unable to validate this on the internet; is there any truth to that claim? Thanks!