We are building a text-based app that searches records in a database then displays the results on a page using an ItemRenderer type deal. We want to include some niceties like infinite-scroll - where a user would simply scroll down and subsequent records would load automatically in the background - and intelligent feedback - where different elements on the page animate in some way to show progress or activity. These can be accomplished easily using either Flex or AJAX.
My superiors, and admittedly myself, are having trouble justifying using Flex to implement this. Some reasons: - Text is not properly selectable (unless you put everything in one huge/ugly/unfeasible TextInput block) - Text is not findable using the browser's CTRL+F - Text is not properly/nicely indexable by search engines - Slower to render than HTML (as fast as it is, it is still slower, more to load, etc) - Inferior mobile experience (I tested 10.1 on my Nexus One, and it's very good, but still far worse (for text/scrolling) than simply using HTML in the native browser (which has built-in scrolling, flicking, and zooming, with zero additional effort, while Flash doesn't). If you do any research for whose using Flex in public applications, you will only find media based sites like: - picnik.com (photos) - beatport.com (mp3's) - mixbook.com (photos) - mastercard.com (only a configurator sub-element) - ANYTHING VIDEO I am having trouble seeing the benefit of using Flex for anything non audio/visual related. Besides the advantage of it being cross-browser/cross-platform, is there any compelling reason to consider Flex for this app rather than HTML/AJAX? Cheers, Baz
