The following example shows a typical development environment for a Flex SDK application:

In this example, application development happens in an environment that is behind a firewall, and you deploy your application SWF file on webserver.example.com. To run the application, you make a request to it from a computer that is also within the firewall. The executing SWF file can access resources on any other server as necessary. In the development environment, the SWF file can directly access web services, or it can access them through a proxy server.

The following example shows a typical deployment environment for a Flex SDK application:

In this example, the customer requests the application SWF file from webserver.example.com, the server returns the SWF file to the customer, and the SWF file plays. The executing SWF file must be able to access the necessary resources from outside the firewall.

Design phase

With Flex SDK, one of your first design decisions might be to choose a design pattern that fits your application requirements. That design pattern might have implications on how you structure your development environment, determine the external data services that your application must access, and define how you integrate your Flex application into a larger web application.

Configure phase

For run-time configuration, you ensure that your executing SWF file can access the necessary resources including asset files (such as image files) and external data services. If you access a resource on a domain other than the domain from which the SWF file is served, you must define a crossdomain.xml file on the target server, or make the request through a proxy server.

Build phase

To build an application for Flex SDK, you define a directory structure on your development system for application files, and define the location of application assets. You then compile, debug, and test your application.

The compile-time configuration for a Flex SDK application is primarily a process of setting compiler options to define the location of SWC and RSLs, to create a SWF file with debug information, or to set additional compiler options. When compiling applications, you compile your application into a single SWF file, and then deploy the SWF file to a web server or application server for testing.

Deploy phase

With Flex SDK, you deploy your application SWF file on your web server or application server. Users then access the deployed SWF file by making an HTTP request in the form:

http://hostname/path/filename.swf

If you embed your SWF file in an HTML or other type of web page using a wrapper, users request the wrapper page. The request to the wrapper page causes the web server or application server to return the SWF file along with the wrapper page.

Secure phase

Security issues for Flex SDK applications often have to do with how the application accesses external resources. For example, you might require a user to log in to access resources, or you might want the application to be able to access external data services that implement some other form of access control.