I have worked on a couple projects that use the new Adobe Flex technology, and I have to admit I have been very pleased with the final product.

I am an old JavaScript hat so after some books it seemed simple enough and I was ready to dive in. I decided to start with the SDK for OS X instead of the Flex Builder, because I liked the idea of using ant to script all of my builds.

The SDK package is simple enough to understand. I went right to /sample and ran the ./build-samples.sh script. Immediately the mxmlc compiler jumped into action. Easy peasy, one, two, threesy I thought.

Hmmmm, this could take a while, maybe I can go update that doc I have been working on…

That is when it happened, mxmlc was stealing my focus. Not once, but constantly. My dock now had tourets! I watched lines scroll by in my terminal in the background as I types into another window…beep, beep, beep…like some damned Ellen Feiss switch commercial. Every time mxmlc was invoked, it lauched as as Java (Java?!? Yes, it would seem that the Flex compiler is implemented in Java.) Each time that Java jumped onto my dock, it would steal focus, then wink away. I would try to type again. Three more letters…typing into a jumping Java process again. Beep! Beep! Beep!

Maybe the rest of you have tiny little projects and only compile one or two things at a time, but to have a process that I launch from the command line demand attention each time it runs in my UI is not cool.