Pros and Cons of Adobe Flex as a Web 2.0 Framework

Answer 1

Well ~~ .. it's more that Silverlight is similar to Flex. It's not Ajax so much as a kind of 'walled-garden' inside of which you have a rich programming environment. Somewhat like Java apps say.

The usual criticism derives from just that. Flex/Flash applications tend to be ignorant of the browser (more or less) so that stuff like back-button usually gives unexpected results.

It'll run on all the current browsers on all platforms. You don't need to "host" flex as you build a SWF file that gets loaded into the browser and is executed by the Flash Player which your users are expected to have already downloaded/installed .. (95+%) penetration helps.

I've been using Flex for the last year or so and it's served my purposes well. It can be integrated nicely with javascript stuff on your web pages and provides a very rich set of capabilities for doing all sorta things like web-services and XML processing and of course all your video/audio/music rich media.

Answer 2

The language us ActionScript 3. Which is fundamentally a strict superset of javascript. You can use javascript as-is. (ActionScript was intended - by Adobe - to be next-gen javascript.)

It can compiled in two modes. One is for hosting in a browser as web app, using the Flash runtime object to provide granular GUI controls.

Or it can be compiled in desktop mode, where it uses another runtime (named AIR) to operate interchangeably on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

I wouldn't compare it to Ajax. It's more like .NET, if .NET didn't have such a disparity between desktop.NET and ASP.NET. Pretend ASP.NET offered a desktop runtime, maybe. (Not a bad idea, actually).

Like a lot of non-MS technology, it tends to be basic yet comprehensive. A lot more conceptual integrity, IMHO. About the same scale, scope, and complexity of VB (if be had had integrity) and useful for about the same set of tasks, for about the same audience of developers and users. Yes, it's got good database connectivity too.

Answer 3

• How productive it is to program in Flex compared to the .Net + Silverlight?

Way more productive than Silverlight as it has a much richer and capable control library. Silverlight is rapidly gaining ground here though. I think by the time SL 4 comes out they will reach feature parity, maybe even SL 3.

• Any technical advantages over other frameworks?

If you can create it in Photoshop, you can pretty much do it in Flex with the help of the Flash drawing API. If you want to build very interesting data visualizations (tree/node diagrams, such as an org chart) you can do this Flex without a ton of work.

• Any disadvantages ?

There is no server-side component to ActionScript so you need to find a way to pass data between Flex and your backend, be it Java, .NET, PHP, etc. There are libraries out there to AMF remoting with just about any backend which makes it easy. But as far as the objects you pass between the two, you need to maintain both or use a code generation tool to create AS3 classes from your backend classes.

• Does it have any known scaling issues?

Flex is simply a presentation technology so this question doesn't really apply.

• What kind of web servers can it be hosted on?

Again, only a presentation technology. It compiles out to a SWF file that is loaded by the browser over HTTP and then executes inside of the Flash Player plugin.