Flex a no-brainer?

I was thinking today about the Flex beta that's going on at the moment, and then thought about the target audience for Flex, i.e. people just like me. By this, I mean people with several years at the wheel of CF, HTML, CSS and JS with some basic flash knowledge.

Well, as far as I can see there is now no longer any valid reason for me to develop anything in Flash anymore now that Flex is around. It's exactly the same argument as CF vs Java. Why write something is Java when I can use a RAD tool like CF?

From a manager's point of view though I can see some possible problems, namely one of cost and confidence. Before, developers were convincing their managers to let them publish their companies first RIA's in Flash. They promised datagrids, large amounts of remotely accessed data and swizzy new interfaces.

However, what flash was actually capable of fell someway short, (although the improvements in Flash Player 8 made massive inroads into some of the main problems) which lost confidence somewhat in the platform as being able to provide RIA's (well, in my experience anyway) from a manager's point of view.

Now Flex is nearly here, and we're again trying to convince managers to re-tool and re-train for the new tools that are again using the Flash platform. Admittedly this is a RAD tool, and there are the great new data services available, but is it as clear cut for those who won't be actually cutting the code?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 27 Mar 2006