Re: [flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...
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.
Re: [flexcoders] Having trouble justifying Flex to the higher-ups... It only seems to be appropriate for media based sites...
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 span and b, 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...
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 li...@thinkloop.com 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 http://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 span and b, 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
