Flex application scalability and compatability

Question

1. How good is a Flex app in handling large amount of data (say, for a reporting kind of application)

2. Are there any memory management issues that need to be kept in mind while developing for such an app

3. Are there any issues in running a Flex app on a Mac?

Answer 1

1) great as long as you're not transferring huge amounts of data at one time using HTTPService. A good AMF remoting like amfPHP runs super fast.

2) Flash player runs on the clients machine, you would need to make sure you aren't using more memory than they have available.

3) If I remember right flash player is kind of weak on the mac, much slower than PCs but I haven't bench-marked them in a while

Answer 2

1. Flex can use a lot of memory in a poorly written application. A well written application will manage it's assets well and will not use more memory than needed. Flex is wonderful for a reporting application since you can do data manipulation on the client and do a lot of client side analysis and re-presentation of data.

2. Profiling. Flex Builder has a decent memory profiler so make sure you use it and don't leave dangling references around. Event handlers can keep references you don't realize if you don't clean them up. States can also cause problems if they're used inappropriately--to manage the state of the whole application for example instead of in a small scale within individual application components.

3. Flex is slower on the mac. This is largely due to the limited api provided by browsers on the mac. On PC the Flash Player has access to GPU acceleration and other low level API's which can make it faster. This is going to get better when Flash Player 10.1 is released since it will take advantage of new core animation api's available in Safari 4 on OSX 10.6.