Unless you have been living under a rock, or have never touched the source code of a web application you have likely heard of Flex or Silverlight.

I am not going to talk about the differences, in reality, I have never used Silverlight, nor have I ever written production code in Flex. But I tell you, from my research and R&D, this is the way of the future for web applications.

Now, the more astute of you will have noticed that I am saying web applications, not sites. This is because Flex and Silverlight are useful for making what is known as Rich Internet Applications.

Using these technologies for your blog site is like using a 30 pound sledge to hammer in finishing nails. Sure you can do it, but you are going to dent a lot of wood.

Personally, when I want to read about the latest souffle cooking recipe from my favourite blog, I don't want to wait for the site to load.

There is no reason to use Flex or similar technologies for simple web sites. The vast majority of sites don't require the vast level of interactivity that Flex provides. Using Flex will limit you to users that have the Flash player installed, which is most, but not all. Some web purists will also not visit your site if it uses Flash.

Then why use Flex to build RIA? Because the value of your application will outweigh any of the negatives that some people will associate with Flash based web applications. And the time you will save in development will allow you to add more content and value then you could with the standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript approach.

So let's get to the point, and talk about the benefits of using Flex.

• Ideal for creating web applications
• No cross platform support issues
  
• Completely portable to any platform that supports Flash (Firefox, IE, QNX, Linux)
  
• Allows for a high degree of interactivity very cheaply
• Flex has a comprehensive visual designer that allows you to drag and drop controls onto the form
• SDK is free
  
• Faster development with their IDE
  
• Better debugging capabilities
• Memory and performance profilers
  

Wow you must be saying, where do I sign up? Well before you do that, there are few cons as well:

• Flex is overkill for simple things
• If you are building UI that interacts with exposed web services, you need a strong middle tier to validate data
• The IDE is not free
• The relationship between MXML and ActionScript is absolutely not the same as the relationship between HTML and JavaScript
  

Overall, I would say Flex is incredibly useful for developing rich internet applications. In fact, if I had of known about this a year ago, I would have started a project with Flex instead of .NET/HTML/CSS and a set of third party charting widgets.

Live and learn.....

Labels: Flex, web development