install

Drupal is a CMS system that can be freely downloaded and used from the Drupal website. It is not an object orientated PHP driven system and so everything is available through function calls and variables.

I have heard that the learning curve on developing Drupal is quite steep, but once you get around this initial hurdle the whole thing is pretty simple. This ease of development means that it is possible to take an idea and use Drupal and all its features as the CMS behind your idea, thus saving you time on your project development.

Flex is a powerful SDK that allows you to build Flash applications that can then be embedded into any web page. The SDK is that Flex uses quite large and covers a whole range of things from interface controls to data processing. To program in Flex you need to use ActionScript 3. What Flex creates as output is swf files, which can be run separately or embedded into a web page.

To get started you will need the Flex SDK. Download the Flex SDK 3 zip file and extract it into a directory where you can get to it. As an example, I put mine in C:\dev\flex_sdk_3.