Flex vs. other ways - Ajax, etc.

[glg1]

Hi all,
I've been looking at Flex for a little while now and am interested in opinions, especially vis-a-vis other RIA approaches including AJAX and all the other modes of DHTML. Flex certainly looks to be easier than AJAX at this point from the development point of view, however, there must be some downsides, given the excitement around AJAX and not around Flex. Is it depolyment in Flash versus standard HTML, or is it actionscript vs. javascript,???

Opinions and thoughts?

Thanks, George

 

[jrottman]

The differences between flex and ajax are some what negligable. They both act as Teir 3 architectures, which offer a better user experience.

The coding is where flex and ajax differ greatly. Flex is an xml taged based language. Flex also works hand in hand with AS. So if you use flash/AS alot you will feel comfortable in flex from the start.

The backend systems are also negligable seeing as you can the most popular systems with either ajax or flex.

In my opinion I prefer flex over ajax, simply because it comes from a company with a strong background in user expereince, server side tools, and over all support.

HTH

 

[ntsiii]

An additional advantage of Flex is that the UI is browser/platform independent, since it is rendered by the Flash Player and not the browser.

Also, the Flex paradigm moves significant state to the client. I find this much easier to work with compared to traditional server side session management.

Tracy

 

[MikeNL]

Go and download the latest beta of Flex 2, you'll be pleasantly surprised how easy Flex is to code

http://labs.macromedia.com

Download the flex builder, the charting components and if you want to use CF as backend, make sure you download the Coldfusion update also downloadable from the Adobe (Macromedia) Labs site.

Good luck!

My blog:

http://www.wantonline.com/blog