10 reasons why Flex is wicked cool

Every couple of months, for some reason unbenownst to me I find myself getting incredibly motivated and enthusiastic about one particular technology that I use every day of the week.  Sometimes this might be ColdFusion, sometimes it might be AIR, sometimes it might be something else entirely that I’ve been researching, but at the moment it’s 100% Adobe’s Flex.

Now, this might sounds very much like a sales orientated blog post but it’s not, it’s a genuine 10 reasons why Flex is what I would call “wicked cool”.

So, on with the 10.

1. Flash Platform

OK, quick lesson for the uninitiated here.  Flex is Flash.  Well, what I mean here, is that Flex is purely a way of developing and generating a SWF file that runs in the Flash Player in the same way that Flash CS4 is an IDE for developing Flash movies. So what does this mean for a regular developer?  Well, this means essentially that anything that can be done with Flash as a runtime can be used from with Flex as well.  For instance, all of the new developments in Flash player 10 are now available to Flex applications as long as the end user has the runtime installed.

2. Open Source

The Flex SDK as it stands is an open source product.  What this means is that, for the large part, Flex is not going to dissapear anywhere after being binned by some company that doesn’t care, but it also means that Adobe cannot do anything really revolutionary with it without the communities input.  Being open source can only be a good thing.

3. Flex Builder

If any of you have ever used the older Flash IDE’s or come from a background largely in the ColdFusion market, you’ll love Flex Builder, most specifically the debugger.  It gives you full intellisense, refactoring and profiling capabilities as well as a full step through debugger.  Best of all, it’s Eclipse based, which means if you’re a common visitor to the likes of CFEclipse, Aptana, PyDev etc you’re already in the right place for Flex.

4. Community

As communities go, the Flex one is a greatly diverse bunch of very friendly people.  Not everyone comes from a Flash background, or even a client-side development background but everyone shares a passion and enthusiasm for Flex.  Additionally the back-ends available for use as back-ends to a Flex application means that if you’re a platform x developer using Flex, you can pretty much guarantee you’re not alone.  There’s plenty of user groups and conferences out there surrounding the Flex community, so if you’re not involved, get out there and get something going – you can only benefit from it.

5. Options

This point largely refers to the itegration opportunities available to the common Flex developer.  Supporting XML, REST, AMF and more, you can pretty much integrate with any backend you want.  Using Rails?  No problem, RubyAMF is out there, or plain old REST.  Python?  PyAMF etc, Java?  BlazeDS or Livecycle.

6. ColdFusion

This point ties in largely with the last.  By far and away the best option for a Flex backend is ColdFusion, the long since apparently dead platform.  ColdFusion gives you the ability to crack out some very simple code, deploy into a super scalable Java environment, and simply connect to Flex using AMF.  There’s no integration work involved, CF understands AMF natively.  Additional to this, Flex “gets” ColdFusion too.  There’s no need to create any sort of complex services-config file in your Flex project, just say “ColdFusion” and you’re up and running.

Additional to this, the Adobe team have hinted at a couple of conferences to a much deeper integration between the two products.  I can’t say too much due to NDA’s but expect it to get a whole load more interesting with a future release.

7. Runtime penetration

Some runtimes out there suffer from one significant problem.  Pre-installation of the runtime.  If you’re a Silverlight developer, Curl developer etc you have to have a serious thinka bout how many of your end users will have the runtime installed ready to receive your application in their browser.  Silverlight is currently knocking around the 10% mark, Curl is way behind that.  Flash?  Well, lets put it this way, there is not a single piece of software on the planet that has as many installations as Flash.  Nothing.    At the time of writing, 97.7% of machines are capable of running Flex applications.  Currently it’s taking Adobe about six months to get a new version of Flash to around 80% of the internet – which is damn fast.

Worried about your users not being able to run Flex?  Don’t be.

8. AMF

The Action Message Format.  One of the main reasons why Flex is so cool.  AMF is a binary transport format native to Flash which allows the flash platform developer to transport complex actionscript types across the internet in an incredibly efficient way.  James Ward, Adobe evangelist, has been running a census on various transport methods for a while now so it’s well worth checking that out to see how good AMF is when stacked up against some of the common alternatives such as JSON or XML.  For full details on AMF, check out the wikipedia page.

9. Adobe AIR

Unless you’ve had your head buried underground for the last year or so, you’ll be familiar with AIR, previously known as Apollo.  From a Flex point of view, the presence of AIR means you, a mere web developer tooled up with the ways of Flex, can deploy your apps to the desktop.  This is especially cool when you consider the capabilities of Flex versus the other AIR tool of choice, good old HTML and Javascript.  For more information on AIR, visit the product page.

10. Creative Suite

A lot of people forget this – Adobe have been at the forefront of creative design tools for several years now leading the way with Photoshop.  Whilst this isn’t a huge thing in itself for a web developer it does have a lot of effect of Flex, namely the fact that several of the Creative Suite tools integrate with Flex and Flash in loads of different ways. If you’ve not seen CS4 yet, you should, it’s brilliant.

So there you go, a quick brain dump of why I think Flex is wicked cool.  I’m not saying that it’s the only thing you need to know to be successful with RIA, but it’s certainly going to get you most of the way there.

Now, can anyone else think of any more than the 10 I have here?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 01 Oct 2008