9 February 2004
Flex and Brady
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Programming .
I have been following the development of the new Macromedia products, Flex, very closely. For those of you not up to speed, its Macromedia’s foray into the world of Rich Internet Applications. It blends the lines between a web based application and a client based application, and can be authored much like a webpage is with HTML.
The impact of this type of technology is tremendous. Flash has for many years has been a great tool to improve usability of an application, but untill now it has taken lots of programming to make a strong RIA. Lots of the projects we do, I would consider RIAs, but again, it is taking us considerable amounts of programming to get them to work and they are extrememly hard to maintain.
Flex stands to change this. Using a technology, or markup to be more precise, they are going to leverage the easy of tagging to allow developers to write their apps in a combination of MXML, Actionscript and CSS. All three pieces allow for the abstraction of the proper information, MXML covers the flow and objects of the application. Actionscript controls the programming and action, while CSS is used for basic styling.
I am in the process of writing a more indepth look at Flex and will post it here as soon as I am finished. If anyone has any direct questions that they are curious about, please feel free to email me and I will research them and include it in the article.
