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x3ro · 2004-05-06 #13

Macromedia have actually pulled off a coup here -- trumping the relatively small mindshare achieved by Mozilla's XUL, and coming up with the goods in advance of MicroSoft's XAML, they've set themselves up as a player in the next generation of rich media internet. Now they can play up Flex and MXML since it's the only show in town that's got already got a big market penetration of the client technology. It leverages their strong position from the ubiquity of the Flash player, takes the best of what they've learnt from CF and Generator, and scaled that up for the enterprise; sharp of them to push development over .NET as well as J2EE, that way they get a foot in both camps.

I don't buy the argument that there's nothing that this adds that you can't do with a hodge-podge of Flash and serverside scripting. The point of this is that the whole system is seamless; and for enterprise developers, they have the resources available from their application servers. Sure, for knocking up a website, Flex will be overkill. But that's not what it's for. This is not 'another Flash'. If you read the docs you'll see that this uses the Flash player. And as for the move to pure scripting ... it makes total sense. Trying to write a UI for a web application in an authoring environment that remains, at heart, an animation package, is asking for trouble. This had to happen at some point: the $12K pricetag is pretty steep, but for the moment, they have something close to a monopoly on rich web clients (unless you count the JVM, but that's doesn't come close to meeting the clientside needs of the new breed of web apps -- it's way too 'fat').

[grumble]The only thing that annoys me about Flex is that now I realise I've wasted a fair bit of time trying to build a (way more basic) development platform for myself using Flash and custom XML documents. Dammit! Anyway, I bet MXML will be a b**** to code in .. [/grumble]

	x3ro	2004-05-06 #13
	Macromedia have actually pulled off a coup here -- trumping the relatively small mindshare achieved by Mozilla's XUL, and coming up with the goods in advance of MicroSoft's XAML, they've set themselves up as a player in the next generation of rich media internet. Now they can play up Flex and MXML since it's the only show in town that's got already got a big market penetration of the client technology. It leverages their strong position from the ubiquity of the Flash player, takes the best of what they've learnt from CF and Generator, and scaled that up for the enterprise; sharp of them to push development over .NET as well as J2EE, that way they get a foot in both camps. I don't buy the argument that there's nothing that this adds that you can't do with a hodge-podge of Flash and serverside scripting. The point of this is that the whole system is seamless; and for enterprise developers, they have the resources available from their application servers. Sure, for knocking up a website, Flex will be overkill. But that's not what it's for. This is not 'another Flash'. If you read the docs you'll see that this uses the Flash player. And as for the move to pure scripting ... it makes total sense. Trying to write a UI for a web application in an authoring environment that remains, at heart, an animation package, is asking for trouble. This had to happen at some point: the $12K pricetag is pretty steep, but for the moment, they have something close to a monopoly on rich web clients (unless you count the JVM, but that's doesn't come close to meeting the clientside needs of the new breed of web apps -- it's way too 'fat'). [grumble]The only thing that annoys me about Flex is that now I realise I've wasted a fair bit of time trying to build a (way more basic) development platform for myself using Flash and custom XML documents. Dammit! Anyway, I bet MXML will be a b**** to code in .. [/grumble]