You can't really compare an animated tree to a non-animated one.
That said, Flex is very sluggish in general. The base classes are much
heavier than the equivalent Flash ones and they add a lot of code related to
layout and sizing that slows everything down. When a component moves or is
resized it broadcasts that to all the components around it, which adjust and
re-broadcast. In addition, there is code in there for special cases, like
every component has an "if I'm in a repeater" section in it that runs just
in case the component happens to be inside a repeater component.
When we modified our charting components to work with Flex we noticed they
were significantly slower. The Flex team told us we should not use
UIObject/UIComponent (the v2 base classes) for our internal movieclips, only
for the main movieclip that sits inside the Flex application. We made this
change (after making our own light base class that has the functionality we
need--styles, events, invalidation) and performance improved incredibly.
I think the Flex component features are great, but they're sluggish, and the
price tag is too much for any of our clients, and we have several installed
applications that cost over a quarter million dollars.
I don't see how XUL is an option though except for extreme cases--requires
FireFox/Mozilla. Any chance there's an ActiveX renderer for XUL that works
in IE?
Sam
----------------------------------------
Blog http://www.rewindlife.com
TeamMM http://www.macromedia.com/go/team
----------------------------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dick Applebaum [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 9:34 AM
> To: CF-Talk
> Subject: RIA options, Flex Flash and others.
>
> There have been several threads lately, about RIAs and PIAs --
> discussing Flex, Flash, XUL, Neuromancer (_javascript_
> Remoting), desktop
> applications and XUL.
>
> I for one was/am critical of the Flash RIA as not being good
> enough --
> resulting in a heavy or sticky feel to the UI.
>
> I realize the advantages of Flash, especially its consistency and
> ubiquity -- I only wish it were more usable and more programmable.
> Flex (at some cost) appears to address the programmability issue.
> Also, there are hints that the next CFMX will include some Flash
> programming capabilities.
>
> That's all well and good, if Flash can deliver acceptable performance
> -- if it can't then I will look elsewhere for RIA solutions.
>
> I like MACR, Their products are good to excellent, their people are
> great -- I have had no negative experiences with either.
>
> That said, Flash still disappoints me -- I would like to see it
> succeed. I would like to be able to use it.
>
> But there is something very wrong.
>
> Several days ago I mentioned that the Flex code explorer
> contained one
> of the slowest menu trees I'd ever seen.
>
> This is one of the apps that MACR uses to showcase the FlexFlash RIA.
>
> It just isn't fast enough to be usable, especially when you consider
> the amount of client resources it consumes to attain poor UI
> performance. My particular criticism is with the expanding and
> collapsing of the folders -- where only client-side RIA processing is
> performed,
>
> Two days ago I learned about XUL.
>
> XUL looks like a possible RIA solution & that too, has been discussed
> in other threads.
>
> To prove to myself that the Flash Tree example was, indeed a poor
> performer, I decided to write a comparable tree menu in XUL. All I
> really did was create (part of) the tree. Selecting an
> item/document/leaf node doesn't do anything. I nested the folders 3
> levels deep and duplicated the "Component Library" outer node enough
> times to get a tree larger than the code explorer. This is enough to
> compare expand/collapse with the Flash tree.
>
> Here it is. You need a current Mozilla or FireFox browser
> tto render
> XUL.
>
> http://67.124.145.42/XUL/XULSampleTreeMenu.xul
>
> Put this up, side-by-side with the Flex Code Explorer at:
>
>
> http://macromedia.com/software/flex/?promoid=home_prod_flex_111703#
>
> Expand enough folders on each to get the window scrolling. Then
> expand/collapse the top node.
>
> Why is Flash so slow?
>
> Thoughts!
>
> Dick
>
> P.S. Display source and you will see the entire XUL program.
>
> P.P.S. The XUL page may be slow to download -- The site is on my
> development machine which is quite busy -- JRUN/CFMX/MySQL,
> VirtualPC/WIN XP, 2 streamers, lots of browser windows & a
> few desktop
> apps
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