The Argument For Flex 1
I have worked on my share of large projects and I have seen businesses make many heinous mistakes in judgement but the one that I am getting the most tired of is the uninformed deciding to build a large application without using Flex. I know what you’re thinking because I have heard all the arguments and I mean every single one of them.
No you can’t write a smaller framework that has layout, styling, accessibility and language support
The answers are:
- No you can’t write a smaller framework that has layout, styling, accessibility and language support
- Yes you can have just as much control over look and feel
- You might not know Flex but if you know Flash you can pick it up FAST
- It is a framework for building applications in Flash, what was it you were building again
- Well you should learn how to use Flex Builder then, you will never go back, it is worth it
I recently attended the SanFlashcisco user group meeting where Grant Skinner spoke and in his talk he bashed Flex a little. Now he tried very hard to back pedal after the fact and explain himself but his explanation was basically that you could only make cookie cutter applications with Flex, that it was only good for forms and that he didn’t have the control that he had in Flash. Now don’t get me wrong, Grant has long been one of my super idols and a huge source of inspiration, heck I can honestly say that without him I wouldn’t be doing what I do today, so it really surprised me to have our opinions on the matter differ so greatly. I honestly believe that what he said was just plain not true. Granted (no pun intended) what Grant is most famous for is not his applications and I can see how Flex is overkill for a bunch of veins swirling around but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t use Flex, or that it would be hard to do in Flex. It is just actionscript after all the only difference is there is a frag-ton of helpful classes added that personally I don’t want to write myself again.
Most of the time I hear push back from agencies who have very visually rich applications. Their concerns are that they won’t be able to control the design to their liking but this is plain not true. Anything you can do in Flash can be brought into Flex as a component so even if you want a crazy bugged out control bar that looks like a caterpillar or a snail for that matter you can totally do it. Just use the Flash Flex Component kit optionally with the prefab design templates for your favorite Adobe creation tool.
Very true statements, but I’d like to comment on two points.
Yes you can have just as much control over look and feel … but it’s not as easy to do the rich visuals. Too often I’ve watched developers barter with designers about what can be done in a given amount of time. “You can change the highlight colors in the DateChooser, but it will take 3-5 hours of monkey patching to underline the numbers”
No you can’t write a smaller framework that has layout, styling, accessibility and language support … I believe you can and will work to prove that statement false. Layout, styling, databinding and more have added up to just under 40k in the Flight Stealth framework. Accessibility is part of Flash and should just extended easily by any decent components (Flex is just now working to get this right for next release). Language support doesn’t have to be costly.
But I agree with everything else - I don’t think there is anything better than Flex out there … yet.