Its that initial hurdle of buying FLEX thats the overall beef at the moment (the only one at that).
FLEX will SAVE YOU money in the end, IF you do understand that its meant to provide you with a RICH UI on existing business logic that is infact portable and accessible over the Internet or mediums like this.
I honestly haven't really looked at FarCrys backend that well, but if it s got a headless engine, there is no reason why you couldn't combine them both.
Going down the path of using FLEX for 40% of your application and HTML/other for the rest is umm, not really the overall point. You can get away with it by using cross-technologies, but essentially its ideally suited for carrying the overall UI workload. In fact i'd probably even go so far as to say, just use Flash MX IDE?
Its not going to replace your Outlooks or other programs, you have to keep in mind the DATA and the Interaction with the data at all times, you can get away with a lot if you are smart in your approach.
At anyrate, yes it saves you on certain projects while others well, look for other technologies i guess.
--
Regards, Scott Barnes - http://www.mossyblog.com http://www.bestrates.com.au
Geoff Bowers wrote:
I think I've lost track of the thread... aren't you saying here that the cost of Flex is justified a hundred times over given an appropriate project to apply the technology to??
-- geoff http://www.daemon.com.au/
Scott Barnes wrote:
Where I was coming from was that if you already have Flash programmers in a place then they will (or should) have established libraries that allow them to put together Flash applications quickly. It is like we currently are with CFMX. We build reusable stuff that makes doing any one job quicker and quicker each time we do it. Those companies who have a reasonable investment in Flash will probably want to continue developing with thier libraries and wont want to throw that away for FLEX.
In theory yes. In theory, we should all have our code nicely commented, tucked away in CVS. Along with nightly backups, and clear and precise project plans for all our applications along with UML diagrams to boot.
In theory..
Fact is, not a lot of Flash Developers out there don't have a clue, sorry, but majority are still grasping how OOP actually works, let alone building libraries and what not. Flash MX by itself, is a very cumbersome language to harness, and doesn't comply with existing OOP language rules and what not. Majority of the time I find myself emulating a technique that should by rights be part of the overall core engine.
The biggest flaw in FLASH development to date, is the simple fact Flash Development is bottlenecked. We plan to go the RIA path for Bestrates.com.au, now basically this site has a few CFMX programmers working on it every day (new features etc). They can share the load between another, and log the code in and out of CVS. Sadly, I can't do this, if we are to build the Flash site. Sure i could log my Class files into CVS, and the actual Flash Binary file, but even thats not as effecient as FLEX could allow.
Furthermore, if they need to radically change the overall Screen, in that "nah that left panels not working, move it to the right" or "what happens when the browser resizes etc" for me to implement these procedures into place (despite libraries), its a mammoth task. (Asking a total RIA screen to dynamically resize, is a big ask in many ways). FLEX on the other hand removes this constant code crunching or hair pulling every time a piece of screen realestate is changed, further more it also takes care of UI feedback (preloaders, initialization bars, accessability etc etc).
Nope, You still need a lot more work via the Flash MX route to just get it to have basic functionality, and in many RIA apps, its a very un-needed tedious task - shit i just finished biting the bullet and dropped FLASh for a small Internal application, and simply went DHTML.
FLEX could of and should of been a nice saviour, and its not just a cluster of libraries / components. It has more to it than that and its waaaaaaaaaaaaay more versatile then Flash MX IDE approach. The technology is the same but the creation process is totally different.
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
