I am wondering, though, how "sexy" the Flash interface would be when generated from that MXML ?
Define "sexy"... If you're programming an application - one that has forms and controls and dynamic data retrieval - then how sexy do you need it to be? You can use CSS for styling elements. You can add graphics and color. You can program transitions and effects (very easily, in MXML).
Or is there something akin to XSLT (MXSLT??) as part of FLEX/Royale that
can tell Flash the layout to use ?
The layout model is similar to that found in several other UI frameworks, using box / grid etc.
Furthermore, are there any plans to have some CFMX extensions (e.g. either
CFX tags. <CFIMPORT>, CFC's or otherwise) that can take MXML (and whatever
method of translation is available) and "generate" the HTML pages from the
same MXML source for "html" based versions of the same system ?
I don't think that would make sense. One of the benefits of using Flex (or Flash in general) is that you can refactor the interactions needed so that the user experience is improved - for example, using an "accordion" layout you can have make a multi-page form much more convenient to interact with. Flex lets you have a single 'page' but with panels dynamically refreshing based on user interaction - that sort of thing is not particularly easy to do in HTML without having multiple pages and the click-refresh interactivity that already makes some web apps a pain to use.
Here's how I imagine things would look when you have both a Flash UI and an HTML for the same application:
+------------+ +-----------+
|Flash client| |HTML client|
+------------+ +-----------+
| |
+------------+ +-----------+
| Flex | |Mach II/cfm|
+------------+ +-----------+
| |
+--------------------------+
| CFC business layer |
+--------------------------+
|
+--------------------------+
| CFC integration layer |
+--------------------------+
|
+--------------------------+
| Data / resource layer |
+--------------------------+The reuse comes at the business / integration / resource layers. Flex is a presentation layer that calls web services in the business layer. I think the closest equivalent in CF is .cfm pages that call CFCs and generate HTML or something like a Mach II application (where the HTML is generated from view .cfm pages and the listener CFCs call into the business layer code).
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
