It’s about time Macromedia finally released their anticipiated RIA development tool, first code named “Royale” , now most recently known as “Flex”.

From Flash 6 to present … when building ria apps entirely in Flash (even MX 2004) represented too many unneeded headaches. If you think otherwise, try building an entire e-commerce site like the acclaimed petstore, or something even more custom. Talk about challenging … even more so, if you’re the only developer on the team that knows Flash.

Flex makes a lot of sense, and I have a feeling a lot of developers are doing to love it. You get a more linear or procedural environment to work in, plus reaping the benefits of Flash for the UI/presentation layer … hence things are a lot more familiar to the Java and .NET developers out there …

After reading the first few hundred of pages of docs from the beta docs, I can honestly say, that this will probably be a winner for Macromedia. Not like generator … I think it’ll stick around for a bit, just like when Microsoft introduced IIS/ASP back in 97 or 98.

The only gripe I have right now, is that the marketing team at MM likes to tout this paradigm as something NEW. In fact, there’s already a presentation server out there that is “flex-like” … Laszlo … my understanding is that they reverse engineered the product and are claiming it as something totally new …

Well, let’s hope it makes everyone’s jobs easier. Flash sometimes shows it animation roots too much when you’re building apps. With Flex, hopefully Flash will stay good at just that: animation, presentation and interactive multimedia!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Actionscript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.