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Adobe Flex Builder 3 software is a highly productive Eclipse based development tool enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex Builder 3 is now available in Standard and Professional editions.

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Features

Powerful coding tools
Flex Builder 3 is a powerful Eclipse based IDE that includes editors for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS, as well as syntax coloring, statement completion, code collapse, interactive step-through debugging, and more.

Rich visual layout
Visually design and preview user interface layout, appearance, and behavior using a rich library of built-in components. Extend the built-in components or create new ones as needed. Interactively set and preview CSS values on any of your components in Flex Builder Design view.

Skinning and styling
Customize the appearance of an application using CSS and graphical property editors. Quickly set the most commonly used properties and preview the results in Design view. Design view has also been enhanced to support rendering of skins and styles, allowing designers and developers to update properties and visualize how they affect each skin without needing to rebuild the application.

Integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3
New Flex Skin Design Extensions for Adobe Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks make it fast and easy to import ready-to-use creative assets from Adobe Creative Suite software directly into Flex Builder 3. Use the new Adobe Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 Professional to create interactive, animated content in Flash that can then be exported as a Flex component.

Code refactoring
The new Flex Builder 3 refactoring engine allows developers to quickly navigate through code or restructure code by renaming all references to a class, method, or variable.

Native support for Adobe AIR
Flex Builder 3 provides the fastest way to create applications for the Adobe AIR runtime, including all the tools required to build, debug, package, and sign Adobe AIR applications. Adobe AIR lets you quickly develop RIAs for the desktop using the same skills and codebase you use to build RIAs for the browser.

Advanced data services
Invoke web services or request XML or other data via HTTP using a rich, built-in library of data access services. Use open source BlazeDS to easily connect applications to back-end services leveraging Flex Remoting and Messaging, providing binary, high-performance, HTTP-based data transport plus real-time data push and pub/sub messaging.

Flex 2 and 3 SDK support
Flex Builder 3 can create applications based on either the Flex 2 SDK or the Flex 3 SDK, enabling developers to leverage many of the great new Flex Builder 3 capabilities while maintaining Flex 2 applications.

Improved project workflows
Use new Flex Builder 3 project wizards to support the most common back ends. New wizards make it fast and easy to get started, whether you're using Adobe ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET, or Java. Workflow for developers using Adobe LiveCycle Data Services is improved as well, and improved project portability support enables developers to share projects and application settings more easily.

Web service introspection
Flex Builder 3 can now retrieve a WSDL and generate ActionScript proxies to make calls and serialize/deserialize strongly typed objects. New code hinting is available for making web service calls and dealing with responses.

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Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional

Additional functions in Professional Edition:

Interactive data visualization
Create data dashboards and interactive data analysis by simply dragging and dropping a chart type and linking it to a data source using the Flex charting library. Use the powerful new Advanced Datagrid to enable users to explore complex data.
Use the powerful new Advanced Datagrid to enable users to explore complex data. Charts have also been enhanced with new interaction support, a drawing API, and support for multiple axes.

Powerful testing tools
The Flex Builder 3 memory and performance profilers enable developers to improve application performance by providing tools to monitor and analyze memory consumption and CPU cycles. Support for automated functional testing tools such as HP QuickTest Professional (formerly Mercury QuickTest Professional) is also now available in Flex Builder 3 Professional.

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