Some Reasons Flex Looks Appealing

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:15:00 GMT

Update It has been brought to my attention that I have repeated some information contained on the Flex homepage in my ramblings here. I just wanted to point out that is wasn't intentional and I was not trying to plagiarize. But the fact that my sentiments reflect that of Adobe's is pure coincidence.

In my JavaFX Too Late... entry I said the following about Flex.

But where are the Flex driven applications? Where are the AIR applications? I'm sure some of you will drop a few links in the comments. But considering the number of blogs I read the the number of different kinds of websites I visit not only for fun but also to try and keep abreast of the latest and greatest going on in development, I have yet to run across a Flex driven web site.

James Ward politely pointed out some links where I could see more Flex in action (not the book). After spending some time doing this I started doing a bit of home brewing of my own with Flex. Here are a few reasons why Flex looks appealing to me (in no particular order).

I don't have to give up Java - Right off the bat this is huge for me. I've invested much of my career in Java and for me to move to something entirely away from Java, well, that something would have to be phenomenal. With flex I can leverage all my Java skills on the server while providing a really nice UI on the client. And I can even use my Java skills while writing ActionScript because they are similar languages.

Useful out of the box - The core set of components are useful enough in themselves for most basic applications. And its not like Swing components where they just do the most basic trivial thing. Flex stock components do what typical users want them to do without any extra work from the developer, for the most part. This segues into my next point pretty well.

Less code more goodiness - Look, I don't mind coding. I am a developer. Writing code is fun. But I'd rather write code that doesn't already exists. I think we all would. Getting flex components up and running requires, generally, very little code to do most common things.

Browser issues - I love JQuery. It solves so many problems when it comes to JavaScript. But it doesn't solve all of them. I spend more time debugging browser issues than anything else. And its not just JavaScript. It's CSS also. I have style-ie.css files. Enough said. With Flex those issues disappear because no matter what browser you use it is Flash (as long as you can live with the 'it is Flash' part).

Open Source - Flex 3 is open source. All of it. Adobe is moving in a good direction to make Flex as viable as it can be and as attractive to developers as they can.

So these are my current reasons for digging deeper into Flex. What I plan to do next is try and come up with a list of reasons not to use Flex. Reasons other than not being the right tool for a specific task. I still believe strongly in choosing the right tool. To choose the right tool you need as much information as possible. The only way for me is to write code so that is what I need to do.

I am still looking for the defacto place to ask specific Flex questions. I've been looking over the official Adobe Flex forums as well as the Yahoo Flex+Java UG. I'm not sure where the real experts hang out. I know for Java it's JavaRanch. Maybe JavaRanch needs a Flex department.

Gregg Bolinger - flex tag

Some Reasons Flex Looks Appealing