First Flex Impressions

With all my increased productivity this week, I’ve taken time to look into Flex 2. I remember hearing about Flex when Macromedia originally released it, but at the time it was a cost prohibitive solution for what it delivered.

Now, however, Adobe has turned Flex into a platform to take note of. My first impression is that I wish I had had Flex 2 a few years ago. It would have been perfect for some of the projects I’ve worked on - applications that needed a bit more than HTML/AJAX can easily deliver but didn’t need to full complexity of a desktop app. Just the data binding features alone would have cut out a lot of headache. At the same time, I was surprised about what came in the box and what didn’t. For example, Flex has a ton of transition effects, but no draggable, collapsable, min/max-able window frame. So far, I’ve only created applications using MXML, Flex’s XML UI markup. I’m interested in seeing what it takes to write up the UI using ActionScript only. I’m also a little concerned about the potential to see classes duplicated between the client and server - that is, ending up writing both a Person.java class and a Person.as class.

I’m not going to take the time to write up a full review. There are plenty of those out there. I recommend checking out the 30 minutes test drive for Java developers. For Rubists on Rails, Adobe also has a set of examples.

The browser is a very poor operating system but we’ve been treating it as such more and more. At some point, it becomes painfully clear that you can stretch and abused HTML and Javascript only so far and at that point, you need to turn to other platforms. Flex may just be one of those platforms. With that said, expect more on Flex from me here in the future.