R – Disadvantages of a Flex project vs an Actionscript project

actionscriptapache-flex

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!

Best Answer

  • 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.
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