Is Flash or Flex better to build a user interactive ordering “wizard” website?

Question

i want to see if these \"build a . . .\" flash sites (to support a user customized ordering process) are done using regular flash or Flex?

1. Site 1
2. Sit

Answer 1

Short answer is to take best from both of them.

And here is a short story, which describe how big Flash project could be done.

Company receive order for a project X, and there are two departments are going to work on it, D (Designers who are going to create all fancy graphic for the project) and P (Programmers who are going to input some life into the lifeless design).

While guys from the P department drinking bear in the basement and creating data model for the project X, configuring software, and doing all routine stuff that are need to be done before starting a new project. Guys from the D department open Flash which is familiar for them, as they spent all their life in Ps,Ai and other Adobe products. (Flash is good, really good, if you want to play with a graphic objects. Move them left or right, add some fancy effects, create animation and stuff like that. Creating graphical objects for the future Flash project inside the Flash IDE is more natural.).

Nobody from the D department had never write a line of code, so when they finish creating first part of graphical assets they just compile this to the .swc file and pass it to the P department, where good fellows already start to wrote some code inside Flash Builder which is looks familiar for them, as they spent a lot amount of time coding with different programming languages inside Eclipse based IDE.

So in the end the project X, is nicely separated into the two parts: graphical assets which are created inside Flash - which was designed for creating animation, and graphic, and code which is written inside Flash Builder, which was specifically designed for this, because Flash wasn't really good for writing big amount of code.

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Coming back to reality and your particular projects. I would suggest to create all screens(steps of customised ordering process) inside Flash, add a linkage for every MovieClips in the library(for the future use with action script). And after import those objects into your pure action script project. In this case you can have generic action script which you will use in different projects (as they are definitely would have some common parts). So you can reuse one code, and just change graphical assets for the different project.

In a case if you want to use only one tool Flash or Flash Builder(for coding Flex or Flash) in my opinion you should choose Flash Builder. Managing code inside it is a just a one pleasure, and I'm not sure if managing code is something that could be applied to the Flash.