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Adobe pumps up rich Internet apps with Flex 2

Tiered pricing plan with no cost for entry-level deployments could make Flex a companion or popular alternative to Ajax

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 07/03/06

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Flex features all the bells and whistles of contemporary rich Internet application development, according to Adobe. "You have rich media such as audio and video [that] can be incorporated into the apps and you also have collaborative data exchange," Whatcott said.

"The end user experience surpasses traditional Web applications. You have no page refreshes, you have rich data visualization," he said.

Ajax can work with Flex, Whatcott said.

"We don't believe that Ajax has to fail for Flex to succeed," said Whatcott. The two technologies fit together "like peanut butter and jelly," he said. An Ajax developer, for example, might use Flex to add charting and graphing to an application, Whatcott said.

Analysts concurred that Ajax, Flex, and Flash can coexist. "The reality is Ajax technology does a subset of what Flash does and with the tools provided by Adobe, you can use whatever combination of Ajax or Flash [you prefer] as a runtime," said analyst Mike Gilpin, vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

Flex, Gilpin said, provides an enterprise solution for developing applications in the context of SOA (service-oriented architecture), with clients using services provided by a backend system.

Also being unveiled in conjunction with Flex 2 is an improved Flash runtime, Flash Player 9. "In some cases, we have seen performance go as much as 10 times faster," Whatcott said.

Performance is improved through a new version of the ActionScript virtual machine, which is where applications are run. ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript Edition 4 specification, which provides the basis for JavaScript.

The Flex Builder 2 IDE, which offers increased productivity, is based on the Eclipse open source software development platform. Since many developers already use Eclipse for Java development, the IDE gives them a familiar environment for development of both Java applications and rich clients.

The IDE supports more advanced code-hinting, in which Flex Builder will provide recommendations on completing statements. The code-hinting feature now works within the Eclipse model.

Flex Builder's visual layout capability has been improved as well, being based on Eclipse with WYSIWYG functionality. Skinning and styling capabilities also have been revamped, enabling developers to apply their own customized look and feel to an application.

Flex Builder 2 costs 99 per seat. An enhanced version featuring the ability to build charts and other graphics costs 49 per developer seat.

About the author

Paul Krill is editor at large InfoWorld.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

 

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