Mike - I know very little about this but here is how I understand it..... (some big guesses in here so correct me if I'm wrong)
FLEX lets you dynamically generate flash movies, *kind* of like generator did. At the moment you can pump dynamic data up to these movies via text files, xml streams or flash remoting. This data is them processed client side by the flash player & the code you have written and is rendered as flash content. What flex adds to this mix is the ability to generate Flash content server-side and pump it up into the client. I can see a bunch of benefits of this sort of thing, including in client side performance. Another advantage is that there is now a standard way to mark up flash content (MXML) in the same way we currently mark up normal web content. So if I'm a WYSIWYG type person I can use flash to make my interface, however if I am a code type person I can use homesite or notepad or anything else I like. This also opens up a heap of possibilities on the scripting & content management side - For example, I have a CMS that generates XML content I can Content -> XSLT -> HTML -> Browser or I can Content -> XSLT -> MXML -> Flash Player or I can Content -> XSLT -> RSS -> News Reader, etc... Central content management and multiple delivery formats. CSS for style, XML for content & ECMAScript for interactivity are becoming increasingly standard - I'm very happy to see Flash move in this direction. AFAIK HALO is a set of "skins" that MM released for flash developers to work with - lots of generic skins for common interface elements. So the big deal is not that you can deliver better end product to your users, but that there are better, more powerful and more flexible ways go through the delivery process. Is it more complicated? Well its something new to learn, but that's IT for you... Cheers Mark ------------------ Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
