Jamie,
> Generally, are people happy with the Flex environment ? Are
> you finding it a productive development environment and are
> you happy with the apps you're creating ?
If you are used to a declarative workflow (JSP/J2EE development) and
using markup + CSS, then Flex is going to work great for you.
If you're used to developers working on local machines, promoting
builds out onto testing/staging servers and then out into production,
using tools like Ant/etc to package up and perform builds, Flex is
going to fit right into your workflow.
If you're used to best-practices such as unit-testing, continuous
integration, etc, then Flex will fit within your workflow. There's
a little more work required to fit into an Ant workflow, but it's
achievable.
>
> Are there many really nasty 'problem areas' that you're
> waiting for Macromedia to address in a future release that
> you've found impossible - or very hard - to workaround ?
>
Not at all ... we've put numerous apps out into production with
Flex, and have found the platform to be incredibly stable in
this regard. Sure there's feature requests we have, and we've
made 'em, and they'll make it in the product at some future point
in time I'm sure.
> Compared to developing a similar app in Flash, how're you
> finding the development speeds ?
I guess this entirely depends on the kind of user-experiences
you're delivering; but we've been delivering RIA with significant
J2EE server-side and complex Flash front-ends, and we've done so
both with Flash (ActionScript 1.0), Flash MX (ActionScript 2.0)
and for the last 18 months or so, with Flex.
I'd need a *very* good reason to go back to Flash based
development; the usual "license price" argument aside (and
for complex apps, I truly believe that the license price is
saved in development time) I see no compelling reason why
one might want to develop with Flash over Flex. I might
have argued some time ago that you may reach a level of
interactivity that would suggest Flash over Flex; however,
the more we stretch Flex, the more elasticity we realise
it has in enabling us to deliver very rich, very interactive
user-experiences.
With Flash, there are just so many hoops that you have to
jump through to deliver complex user-experiences, that you
simply don't have to jump through with Flex. Furthermore,
with Flash, you're very much exposed to the innards of Flash
on a daily basis, if you want to get performance out of
your apps; with Flex, this is not nearly so often the case.
To me; it's like coding in Assembly Language or at best, C,
compared to a Java development workflow with a rich set of
libraries. Only with Flash -> Flex, the performance is
achieved as you move to the right, not to the left.
Not only do we deliver Flex apps more quickly and easily than
Flash based apps, we believe we are delivering them more quickly
than JSP front-end applications. Furthermore, the degree of
reuse, the scalability, the maintainability of these applications
is so much greater with Flex architected RIA than with Flash
architected ones.
I was very recently looking at some Flash RIA, in the wild
notion of pulling together a Flash + Cairngorm sample
application (to dispel the myths that Cairngorm doesn't work
with Flash ... it *began* with Flash) and I'd forgotton just
how much the whole movie clip, linkage, library, timeline,
stop frames, etc, metaphors imposed on application
architecture. I've not yet decided whether dispelling myth
justifies the tearing out of hair. :-)
More importantly with Flash however, are the things that you
can't do that you can do with Flex; most notably, having multiple
developers working on the UI at the same time, and use a
source code controls system to manage the non-exclusive checkout
and merging of files. Only one person can work on a binary FLA
at one time, that's simply not the case with a UI composed of
multiple MXML files.
For me, that was the single-biggest reason why Flash development
of RIAs was not scalable to enterprise level application
development teams.
Whoa........I could ride this high horse all day.
Hope the above is the ammunition you need,
Best,
Steven
--
Steven Webster
Technical Director
iteration::two
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