Flash has been a familiar presence on the web for ten or more years now, and can deliver much-touted "Rich Internet Applications" that support the powerful functionality of a desktop application yet are delivered over the web. Great graphics capabilities combined with small download sizes have made Flash a clear choice for many visually enticing web-apps - including those used for online learning such as MecMovies, a excellent suite of educational lessons, simulations and problems for a Mechanics of Materials course in engineering.

Flash has always been more a tool for the graphic designer than the software developer but Adobe changed that with the introduction of Flex. Flex is "Flash-for-developers"; Flex programs are written in Actionscript and MXML, and then compiled into Flash movies that can be viewed in a web browser. Unless otherwise specified, all the programs on this site are written using the Flex framework.

So far, the site only demonstrates "live" solutions to a number of engineering and related problems common in two-year college diploma courses. These are beta programs that will be included in proposed "live" electronic booklets to be released (incrementally) at some indeterminate time in the future.

The programming code for many of these examples is freely available by right-clicking on a movie and selecting "View Source." The source code here is certainly not the only way that this type of program can, or should, be implemented. The source code is provided for a couple of reasons: so that anyone can, if interested, take my code and modify it to construct their own Flex programs and, also, so that any experienced "Flexers" that stumble across this site can send suggestions for improvements in the code. Suggestions and constructive criticism are most definitely welcomed, as are bug reports and feedback.

Adobe has made the Flex SDK open source and also offers a 60-day free trial to try out the Flex IDE (an integrated development environment with all sorts of tools to make development more efficient). And the IDE is free to all students and to faculty at post-secondary institutions. There really is no excuse for not trying it out!