The Flex Killer

Jason Clark relates his recent Flex experience:

"We spent about a month with Flex, making mock-ups of various screens that the application had.   The user interfaces you can build are impressive, they look very “Mac’ish”, but can be fully customized via CSS to look however you want.  We figured that Flex would save about 2-3 months work on building a similar interface using straight ASP.NET/CSS interface.  Most of the UI components that Flex provides can be done using ASP.NET minus drag and drop, and some of the behaviors like minimizing panels etc.   Those we would have to write JS libraries for, and would probably not work on every single browser out there (although they would function on the major browsers we’d support). 

So, the decision of whether to use Flex or not came down to a few things for us.  One was the IDE.  The strength of a language is tightly coupled with it’s IDE, if the IDE isn’t strong then the language suffers.  I’d say this was probably one of the biggest reasons we decided to stay with the “old school” way of doing things for now.   The IDE that is shipped with Macromedia Flex is called “Flex Builder”, it’s essentially a re-skinned Dreamweaver with some Flex specific widgets and a debugger.    The debugging is a bit on the weak side, sometimes it wouldn’t stop at breakpoints, it was slow and if you wrote your own controls the debugger wouldn’t see them.  Overall the IDE seemed like an afterthought, “heck we built a language, let’s patch up Dreamweaver and use that”.    An IDE architected and coupled with the language is a necessity, having been used to Visual Studio my expectations were high.

 

Besides the IDE issues, the $12K price tag per server and lack of native .NET support also played into our decision to stick with an ASP.NET interface for the time being. Another factor was performance, particularly the Grid component.   If you moved the scroll bar on a grid up and down, you could watch your CPU usage spike at 30%+ depending on the machine." [1]

 

If Flex interests you, I highly recommend checking out what the Xamlon guys are doing. Robin Debreuil is over there now doing some really interesting .NET -> SWF projects. Looks like they will have a fully functional XAML+C#->SWF converter at some point. You can follow along with their progress on Robin's blog [2]. Very cool stuff which I am personally far more interested in than Flex.

 

[1] http://weblogs.asp.net/jclarknet/archive/2005/03/02/383921.aspx
[2] http://www.xamlon.com

[3] http://blog.debreuil.com/default.aspx   

7 Comments

  • Yes.



    Dreamwever is not good as an IDE. It's problems date back to the dreamweaver 2/3 days.



    There hasn't been a good version since 3.



    The scrolling issues may be fixed with Flash 8, but the price and approach by MM is really lacking in reality.

  • Holy S**t, you're back! ;)

    Where on God's green earth have you been for so long?

  • I've been extremely busy the past few months with various projects. My schedule is finally freeing up a bit so I get to hit the blogs again :).

  • Let's hope the MM guys don't see this. You'll have throngs of people who use ColdFusion drop down upon you saying that CF is the best thing since sliced bread, and that everything else out there sucks, and that since CF runs on top of a J2EE server it's great, and that therefore Flex is also awesome as well, and why the heck wouldn't anyone it, except that it costs a fortune, uses the simply awful DW IDE, and it's slower than molasses.



    But hey, it's from MM, the makers of ColdFusion, and therefore must be better than anything MS has ever made, including that thing called Visual Studio, which has Intellisense, which the MM folks tell me is a feature that ColdFusion people don't need, because typing is good for.

  • Happened to just come across this entry, so here's a few comments from a CF developer who now primarily works with J2EE and who had the misfortune of having to work on ASP projects in the past:

    1.) Flex Builder is built on Eclipse, not Dreamweaver.

    2.) While it's certainly a wonderful thing that "classic" ASP is finally going away, the "costs a fortune" argument is patently false as application development and maintenance are typically the greatest costs. Sure ASP and now .NET come with Windows, but you make up any initial cost savings in development time and long-term maintenance costs. This has been true all along.

    Then again Microsoft developers love the built-in employment aspects of a lousy technology...you'll have to maintain the garbage forever!

  • so guys can you tell if i use flex in my asp.net and hosted on internet, shall i pay amount for flex.

  • Flex and the huge price tag went out the window sonce 2.0.xxx

    It is one the most awesome interface development tool since sliced bread!

    Code once and use everywhere... now thats more like it! Can't say that 'bout good ole .Net...

    as a backend language - I'd code my web services right into SQL Server if thats the DB im using...

    Flex has all the versatility needed for the next killer app... wait till it goes Mobile!

Comments have been disabled for this content.