Brady, the Flex IDE - first peeks

Brady is one of several IDE's for Macromedia Flex, the new serverside, enterprise technology for making SWF files. Brady is based on Dreamweaver, but contains much more.

A great, new article is up at the Macromedia Developer Center, detailing the new Flex IDE from Macromedia called Brady. Macromedia has already made a lot of info available, but this article sums it all up nicely. Brady is based on Dreamweaver MX 2004. It can do all the things you usually do in Dreamweaver (PHP, ASP, CFM,CSS, HTML and so on), but then some extra Flex stuff.

Some of you may remember a program called Macromedia UltraDev? This was a special version of Dreamweaver, that could do all the dynamic, server related things you now do with Dreamweaver. The product never took off, and soon Macromedia shelved UltraDev and put the features into Dreamweaver. Why won't Brady go the same way?

There are several reasons for this, and the main reason is that apart from being a connected coding environment, Brady also offers a mode called Design View. This is very much like the ordinary design view in Dreamweaver, but it allows you to design Flex applications using drag and drop. Brady is sort of a competitor to the Flash IDE, since it offers SWF authoring using Flex. You must however have Flex installed somewhere. Brady will just build the code you need to input and preview the results.

The Tag inspector will give you quick access to all parameters of the components you drop into the design. Code hinting will also save you time. Brady will also come with it's own Actionscript Debugger, something that is sure to come in handy. Brady also does visual data binding and setup of external data sources, much like in Flash MX 2004.

Brady should allow for some really rapid prototyping of applications. This looks promising, so take a look at the article at Macromedia (or go back to work so you can afford the $12,000 Flex license).
Visit the MM Dev Center to read more about Brady

 

 

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