Warning William ... Brain Dump in Progress... First I want to mention that I try not to compare them too much on email lists because what invariably happens is that somebody somewhere reads the post, takes a line or two out of context and it becomes overemphasized. Or somebody compiles all the comparison posts into a horribly simplified and misleading table and posts it somewhere for managers to use instead of giving their developers the time to evaluate the options for themselves.
I do think it's appropriate to compare them a little bit here as methods of flash coding and I do want to offer my summary of current thoughts for fellow flash developers who are thinking of trying them out. But anybody who reads this, please consider it light conversation. Like Matthias, I've spent a lot of time now with them both and think that it really comes down to your criteria more than anything else. I can see a lot of reasons why even the same company might use one instead of another on different projects and I'm certain to miss some of the important points of comparison. I'm interested in Haxe also, but focus on Flash, Flex and Laszlo because I'm a contractor in a small city, so a lot of work seems to pop up in mid project, when the language choice has been made long ago and they need an extra set of hands or help with a problem. I should mention that I have less experience with Flex than I do with Flash or Laszlo, and more with Flex 1 than 2, though I've spent 2 months now trying to catch up with Flex2. In general, I prefer them both over Flash for projects where you have more than one person, but for small programs I think it's quicker to do them in Flash and they both benefit from Flash as a prototype tool and benefit from swf vector assets guiding the design, even if you are going to use the drawing api to draw out the images. The things that I love about Laszlo and Flex are their maintainability and how they scale to larger applications and more people. These are the same. I love the declarative nature of the xml tags, but find xml itself to be a bit clunky and would be curious to see what declarative layout features in a language like Haxe might look like. It will also be interesting to see what Flash 9 does for components and layout. Language Features: States, Binding, Constraints, Animators These are all very similar since Flex2. In general, Laszlo's syntax is more terse and Flex's is more formal. Things happen automatically for you in Lzx that you have to explicitly type in with mxml. Personally I like the terser syntax of Laszlo, but realize that Flex's more formal style; which reminds me of taking my medicine, has some advantages. A good example for comparison here is the repeaters. With Flex you need to embed things in a repeater component. Laszlo's views automatically replicate when the view is bound to more than one data node. In general, the lzx way is nicer, but what do you do when you want to explicitly reference one of the replicated views after the fact to do some manipulation? You need to know what's happening behind the scenes and know that an array of clones has been created for you; that you can use the array to reference them. Something like that tripped up a friend of mine when he was learning lzx. It's nice to have things happen for you invisibly, but it raises the stakes that you know what is happening behind the scenes. Similarly a new coder given the equivalent code written in the two languages would have the name of the repeater to go from to look up what is happening, so there is some benefit to being explicit from the start - and this probably enables some speed optimization in Flex - it just ends up also being much more verbose, which gets old. E4x and Regular expressions are two really nice language features Flex has at this point that Lzx doesn't. But at some point in the future those will be incorporated into lzx as well. Flash Player Features:Drawing Api, Video, Sound, Printing, Fonts and Text Formatting This is a mixed bag, but is generally in Flex's favor over both Laszlo and Flash in that Flex and As3 fixed and improved some fundamentals that laszlo hasn't incorporated yet. A big one is text formatting. Like with Haxe, the actionscript api's are still available to you with Laszlo, but in most cases they've wrapped up functionality into their own classes. In many cases there is some benefit to this as it allowed them to fix things that were fundamentally wrong with the early versions of the flash player, but now that everything seems to work, it does potentially become tougher to track down problems because you have two layers instead of one to look at. On rare occasions you still need to actually use actionscript to access some of these features. Components The "Out of the Box" Lzx components are generally good, but not quite as good as the Flex ones. I don't think they look as nice, and a few of them are slower than their Flex counterparts, though I've yet to see a speed problem that wasn't fixable. Skining them is about the same in terms of dificulty, generally less pleasent than it should be, but doable. Flex has a greater range of style properties. I think it's far easier and quicker to create new components from scratch in Lzx than in Flex. The Flex charting components are pretty impressive and the Lzx ones are just a good starting point. Managing Data A big variable here is whether you are using Remoting and/or FDS or whether you are passing your data all as xml using a REST protocol. If you have a CF or Java programmer with remoting capabilites and Flex on the front end of a forms based client server application, I don't know how you can beat that for either speed of development or efficiency of communication. But if you have a REST protocol passing xml to your client, which is what Laszlo recommends and which I do like, they become more comparable. I think I might still give Flex the edge here if you don't have control over the xml and have to do a lot of merging of different xml results into new datasets for display. I found that to be a bit painfull in Lzx but haven't done it in Flex so I could just be thinking the grass might be greener. I like the idea of e4x, but I'm not sure it's actually faster or easier, it just seems to look nicer and be more terse. The validators and formatters are a nice formalism in Flex. Though you do the same thing in lzx and it takes about the same amount of effort, it's nice to have them formalized for consistency. Layout Currently I like Laszlo's layout methods much better than Flex's, but I may change my mind once I get more familiar with the intricate rules that Flex's layout components use. They seem very well designed for form based components and interfaces and you can't argue with how easy and nice it is to put together liquid layouts in flex builder, but the Lzx way is simple and flexible. You can tell any view or component to either ignore the layout it's in, or to apply the layout it's in, or to switch back and forth without changing the view structure. Accessibility At this point I think it seems much easier to create accessible applications with Flex than with Laszlo. Laszlo has an api that you can use to access the flash player's cababilities, and it looks like simple stuff works simply, but more complicated interactions might add some real work. I've yet to do it in Lzx and it seems pretty easy in Flex. I'm waiting until they finish the dhtml runtime before I look into lzx's accesibility more as I imagine that will change things. Personally what I'd really like to do is create tools that help make accessible sites that don't rely on screen readers and have a real human voice read the text content, but that's another conversation. Tools Flex Builder is really nice and I'm sure will get better. I'm happy to pay for it too, but it worries me now that I have a Pc as my main computer and a Mac as my laptop that I can't use the same license for both. If it were just for Flex Builder I wouldn't mind buying a license for both, but then you think of all the other Adobe tools with the same license and I worry a lot how expensive that would get. I really don't want to use a vm and am starting to regret getting the mac as my laptop. the IDE4Laszlo tool isn't really worth using. I ended up just using eclipse with subclipse and xmlbuddy for my laszlo work, which I find to be fine and I don't have to worry about that licence problem. I like paying for software because it keeps people creating software that I want, but that license problem is really nagging at me and could really turn me more open source minded. I'm also interested in a report from Max where someone said that Fireworks might end up as a skinning tool for Flex. That would be nice. I always liked that tool and think it would serve that purpose well. But the more money I plan on putting towards this stuff the more that license thing will bother me. Community and Environment The Flex community is much larger, it's too bad but Laszlo hasn't gotten as much help from the open source community as I would have hoped for. The Laszlo systems folk are really great though and participate regularly on the laszlo-dev email list, so you always know specifically what they are working on. I also LOVE having the JIRA bugbase online so that before begining any project you can do a search on the various things that you are going to be using and get a heads up on any bugs that might nick you ahead of time. The Future I haven't really looked at the dhtml runtime yet, but that obviously has promise. I feel like I know Laszlo and Flash well enough now, but still need to get caught up on Flex2, the last time I learned about Flex heavily was with v1, though I've spent the last 2 months trying to get caught up, it seems like it will be another month or two before I feel like I really know how to do everything properly enough to take on contracting work with it. I hate taking on contracting work until I know something pretty solidly because otherwise it makes life pretty miserable. Haxe/Actionstep/Sandy? I was just thinking of how nice that Haxe/Actionstep would be while writing this and before pressing "send" noticed a post by Scott Hyndman that such a combo might exist someday as well. I would take that pretty seriously for personal development in the near future. Anyway for any trivia buffs out there, that's my long winded take on them up to this point. -Cort _______________________________________________ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
