Re: [flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...

[Alex Harui]

There should be some improvements to text performance real soon (4.1) which you 
can try out in the nightly builds, but it still won’t beat HTML.  The question 
is really if there are other advantages of Flex/Flash that will outweigh the 
trade-off.  Sometimes you can do things that will make Flash appear faster even 
though raw performance may be lacking.


On 5/25/10 3:56 PM, "Baz"  wrote:






Thanks Oleg. You confirmed my suspicions. You are right that Flex/Flash 
performs very well for exactly the type of site you referenced (pixlr.com 
 ). I can affirm though, that it does not perform great with 
text heavy activities - especially if we are talking about RichEditableText 
with the  and , etc - even excluding discussion of load times and 
such, just runtime performance is flickery, choppy, etc.

I guess I have to master JQuery now, sad... I love Flex.






--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe System, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Re: [flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...

[Baz]

Thanks Oleg. You confirmed my suspicions. You are right that Flex/Flash
performs very well for exactly the type of site you referenced (pixlr.com).
I can affirm though, that it does not perform great with text heavy
activities - especially if we are talking about RichEditableText with the
 and , etc - even excluding discussion of load times and such, just
runtime performance is flickery, choppy, etc.

I guess I have to master JQuery now, sad... I love Flex.

Re: [flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...

[Oleg Sivokon]

Actually some of your observations are imprecise, but this is because you
compared wrong things.
Flex is to general name. So, if you are talking about Flex framework - yes,
I would imagine it is slower when rendering simple stuff as compared to
HTML, though it may compete against HTML when it comes to complex layout.
However, if we speak about normal AS3 it will be significantly faster than
Canvas, though, for the very basic tabloid-like pagination it may not be
so... There is a problem if you want to measure SWF size against HTML. In
general, SWF would win, because it is a binary zipped format. However, often
times people tend to overuse this feature, so they put lots of content in.
If you want to see a what I would call a good example of using flash (not
Flex framework) here it is: http://www.pixlr.com/editor/ this site loads at
average 2 times faster than any VBulletin board and about 5 times faster
then Gmail :) and it is sophisticated enough to be compared to the sites
I've mentioned.
Also, regarding your research. Flash isn't about delivering textual content,
and although I think I remember Adobe promised Ctrl+F integration in Flash
Player 10.1, I don't think it is going to change the situation.
So, if text accessibility is a core requirement I would think that you would
be better of with HTML and JavaScript.

[flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...

[Baz]

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