I’m not sure what the big deal is with Flex either, but I’d still like to try it out. The whole XML thing is something Flash has always supported and pushed.

Both platforms use Actionscript as a base. Flex seems to use MXML as the way to style components and screen elements. Flash uses an interface that allows you to draw and place everything exactly how you want it to look.

Tempting as it is, I’m not going to flame back – it’s plain from your comments and questions that you have never done any enterprise development whatsoever in Flash, and simply *know* Flex. Flash development doesn’t happen on the timeline, it has most if not all of the components available to Flex, and it scales as well as the developer has written it to. Like many developers (perhaps CF guys being the worst offenders in my experience), you don’t appear to know anything about Flash, but are nonetheless happy to describe it in the league of a toy for animations and banner ads. It’s depressing – any competent Flash developer will tell you the same thing.

Can you implement a Cairngorm (or other) architecture? Does it support data binding? CSS? Unit testing? Does Flash have native charting components? Does it have a complete set of all the UI components that Flex has? Data grids, and so on? Is there a Flash version of Flex Data Services? Is it easy to do a “data push” in Flash? (Like with Granite DS or Blaze DS?) Can you use a reporting tool like ClearBI in Flash? Does Flash have a profiler? Can you debug a Flash app the same way you can debug a Java app?

The answer to some of these may be “yes” but I know plain Flash does not do all of this. And of course in Flash, aren’t you designing within a “movie timeline”? Maybe this seems normal if you’re used to it, but it’s pretty weird from an application design or RIA standpoint.

I’m a fan of using the right tool for the job – usually if something wasn’t designed for what it’s being used for, it’s probably not the right tool. (Plain Flash for enterprise systems? Doesn’t sound wise to me…)

Give Flex 2 or even 3 (realizing it’s still beta) a try and if you don’t realize why it’s 50 times better than using Flash…(not to mention alternatives like JSP/Ajax etc), you’d have to be a “seriously biased individual”! (To put it nicely)

Or just @#$%in crazy dumb.

My biggest problem with Flex is the licensing model, two percent of sales on an enterprise application is huge money and directly impacts the bottom line product performance. So we are rearchitecting to eliminate the need for server side flex support to eliminate this unnecessary expense from the product cost. Beware of the live data services in 2.x and up – they are very expensive.

Very true. Just look at the FusionCharts. It plots dynamic data over Flash charts through XML. FusionGadgets displays live data just with Flash and XML. So that cannot be the USP for Flex!

It definitely does seem like more recent versions of Flex have less problems than 1.5 and previous versions. One of the biggest problems we’ve encountered (and have seen all over the FlexCoders group, of which most of us have had experience with) is in caching and actually seeing our changes reflected in the site.

There is no way that we will ever upgrade from Flex 1.5 to a higher version, that’s just the way it is. Sensationalist title aside, Flex successfully adds needless complexity and extra work for developers and takes away responsibility fro our designers. Is the goal to render design work obsolete?

Flex 2 and Flex 3 remove the server requirement – you no longer need a server to compile Flex applications. Many (most) developers (like Robert) find that a lot easier than the previous Flex 1.5 software.

To help you get your job done, head over to http://flex.org/community/ and look up some of the community links, like the FlexCoders email group. There are a ton of developers that may be willing to help you out.

Mike

Mike Potter
Flex Developer Marketing
Adobe Systems Inc.

Here’s the part that rubs me the wrong way, and this is not Flex’s fault exactly. It’s a technology that, when it was implemented, was new. No one here at our company knew it, and the guy who made our Flex sites had no idea what he was doing. I inherited one of his projects (a 100% Flex page, the only other code is the object embed tag).

None of us know Flex, none of us know how to maintain an Apache server, we’re pretty strictly IIS except for the old legacy Flex code. There is no chance of us upgrading because it’s “risky”. Right now where things stand is that I have an existing website without code, because the Flex code I have does not compile.

This means I can’t make any changes to a site that is already live without first going into a whole slew of source code written by someone who literally used every methodology Adobe/Macromedia suggested in tutorials, even if it was completely redundant. Then I have to figure out the errors, fix them, recompile, etc. which will take days, if not longer, because there are over 40 separate errors, many of which occure multiple times on different lines.

It seems annoying to me that the only way to make an extremely minor change like fixing a typo is to completely strip down our project. That’s why Flex and I don’t get along, because in the hands of the wrong people, who have listened to various Flex evangelists, you get stupid situations like this one.

Apparently Macromedia back in the day was claiming that Flex could, and should, be used to build whole websites. First of all, the SEO implications are astonishing. Second of all, the above situation could, and did, happen. Now we’re up a creek without a paddle, and I am counting the days until Flex is out of our company forever.