MXML
(Macromedia FleX Markup Language) An XML-based set of tags used with Adobe’s Flex
development system to describe the user interface in Flash applications. Introduced in
2004, it is used in conjunction with ActionScript for creating interactive Flash
programs.
The greatest thing about the Flex Framework in my eyes is its utilization of an XML
based language (MXML) for it’s primary scripting. MXML allows you to create, bind and
structure objets in a very straightforward manner. This then leads into other
advantages such as rapid prototyping and development and so on and so forth.
Mark-up languages have always been easy to author and understand, just look back at
HTML for example. Your average person interested in tech could pick up basic HTML in a
very short space of time, then boom, their a web developer just by understanding the
behavior of a few predefined tags. A mark-up developer never really wonders why the
page is working the way it is, they never wonder why they get constraint and layout
flows for free and its OK if their code isn’t perfect as they still get some kind of
output from it (unless they went wild with a comment tag).
And so now with MXML, it’s proven that an XML based language can work in the context of
creating ActionScript applications. So why is MXML limited to the Flex Framework? Well,
the simple answer is that a lot of the META-tags and curly-braces used in the MXML
language are only compatible with the Flex Framework. Those little snippets are the
worker bees of the Flex Framework who fly around making sure everything is hooked up
correctly into the underlaying ActionScript.
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