Wow! It's great to hear the enthusiasm, complements, concerns,
questions and bug reports from everyone! Thank you! I will do my best
to respond to everything.
Thank you for the bug report on the pod cluster problem, ie the third
pod on the Products view not getting placed inside the cluster. This is
my first problem to work on today. :)
The question of "Why use Flex for this site?" is very valid and I will
do my best to address it. What you all see on pillardata.com is not all
that we have built (some of you noticed the Login link). We actually
started building the customer support portal long before the public
marketing portal. For the customer support portal, Flex makes more
sense. We have lots of datagrids and more interactive elements. When
we set out to build the CS site we wanted to build a Flex portal
framework that would allow us to easily and rapidly build new portal
sites. After round one of the CS site, we tackled the marketing site,
utilizing the same exact framework as the CS site. The two sites even
use the same rsl's but the CS site has an additional rsl. The Flex
portion of the Marketing site you see now really only took about 15 man
days to build and test. This includes a number of complex forms, a
complex search system, a complex Documents Pod, and all the other pods
you see. I have coded many Struts / JSP applications and I honestly
don't think that we could have done anything even close to what you see
now in HTML / DHTML in 15 man days. Especially with all the ties that
this thing has to our Interwoven CMS. The Flex Portal framework was
built by Macromedia Consulting and they did a truly fabulous job! We
now can build out the other portal sites very quickly... Including a
reseller portal, prospect portal, intranet, etc. Maintainability and
reusability of what we have now just doesn't compare with a standard
HTML site. For example, Search and Documents get reused in the CS
portal. Same exact pod, just different data coming from the backend. I
know that you can do that with a Struts app, but if you saw the code
(around 100 lines of ActionScript and mxml for the Search Results Pod
and the same for the Documents Pod) you would be really impressed. It
really is maintainable and reusable. There really is a separation of
layers. Much more than I have ever seen in a traditional web-app. So I
guess that's reason #1. Reason #2 is that although the site looks like
a typical web site now, just wait. Up coming versions will have
streaming video which will eventually be generating events at specific
places in the video causing different things to happen in different
pods. It will be an interactive experience very different from how the
web is typically used. As the marketing folks get more and more
creative, the question of using Flex become less and less relevant.
Reason #3 is that by using a RIA we differentiate ourselves from our
competitors. One comment from a customer after using the CS Portal was
something like "From now on I am going to be very disappointed with
every other support site I use." So reason #4 is that Experience
Matters! Flex helps us easily create a much more usable site. Check
out the forms and validators! They rock! They are not perfect, but
much better than the typical web forms. Reason #5 is that building Flex
sites is really enjoyable! I don't have to spend time on the dealing
with the ugliness of embedded tables, css positioning, javascript, etc.
and making it all work the same on every browser and every OS out there.
With a few very minor exceptions, if the user has Flash 7, no matter
what browser or OS they are on, they see the same thing. I do not have
any actionscript that detects the browser version and has browser
specific logic. Those days are over for me... Thank God!
Now moving on...
Spidering: We have a simple spidering solution which hasn't been
implemented yet... Next week. Basically we are going to have a plain
html / jsp page that connects to Interwoven and creates a hierarchy of
the site. That page when accessed by a typical web user will redirect
them to the correct place in the portal. We will use a hidden iframe
for this as well as do User-Agent detection to make sure that GoogleBot
and other spiders get the html version instead of the flash one.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a standard web service API that the
spiders would use for site indexing? ;)
Bookmarking: I am addressing this as well. I think I am going to be
able to use named anchors to deal with this. Should have something
working in the next few weeks.
Preloader / Initialization time: We are also addressing this. Soon
there will be a more custom / Pillar branded preloader. The
initialization time needs some help. I have been told that Flash 8 will
greatly help this, but we are also looking into other ways to fix this
before Flash 8. * remember my post a few days about getting the
profiler to work ;) *
Font sizing: This really shouldn't be too hard. Maybe next week I will
attempt to tackle it.
Image loading: This was a question by Al. We are doing dynamic loading
of all the images we can. Others get built into the swf, like
transparent gif's, and ImageButton images, etc.
Bread crumbs / trail: This was in the original spec but due to time
constraints and some design issues it was left out. We are evaluating
this and may just fix the nav bar to better indicate where you are in
the site.
I hope that answers all of the questions that have come up. I truly am
thankful for all of the positive and constructive comments, as well as
the bug reports! Thank you all!
-James
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