Is Flex ready for prime time?

Question

I'm working on a project that currently has zero users but we would like to scale up to potentially hundreds. Currently we are running on a MySQL database with AMFPHP interacting with Flex. We used Flex because of its robust graphic features (important to this project) and because the initial developer (not me) already knew ActionScript. We are currently using AIR but might switch to web-based Flash at some point.

My questions are:

1. Is Flex a good tool for a project like this?
2. What are the main limitations of Flex that we might encounter?
3. What are other development platforms we might want to consider?

Thanks. - Dave

Answer 1

Flex has no inherent scalability problems, however if you have a graphic intensive application, proper serving of these resources might be a problem, but that has little to do with Flex.

The only note-worthy and likely platform you won't be able to run on is the iPhone (no flash) and some older non-flash mobile devices (although most support Flash-lite nowadays)

As for alternatives, if you are Graphics heavy, and don't mind the iPhone, then Flex is good if not best cross platform solution besides using pure HTML technologies, the trick here is HTML alone can do 99% of what Flex can do, but if your App requires the missing 1% then you're out of Luck, also Flex will reduce crossplatform and most browser compatibility issues. So it might make your work more productive.

Answer 2

Flex + AIR is probably as good a tool as Visual Basic was; it may be a better tool for having a much more flexible programming language and having free development tools, but keep the limitations in mind....

The main limitation I've seen from working with it is documentation. There seems to be not enough documentation, not good enough documentation, and not enough high-visibility work on it in the community. (This is coming from years in .NET; I've been constantly upset with how little MSDN says about methods but generally able to deal with it by finding the most useful blog posts.)

Other possible development platforms would depend very heavily on the specifics of the project. Web-based platforms bog down in deep, stateful interactions with data sets (even with nice AJAX libraries), whereas maintaining client-side installations of any thick client program (say, Flex + AIR) might be overkill if it's just a few CRUD forms.

Answer 3

Silverlight 2 is an alternative to consider. WPF if you're looking for something with offline support.

Answer 4

Short answer, Yes. There are already many prime-time Apps using Flex as their UI development platform. If you go to the Adobe site they showcase quite a few.

Speaking personally, I chose Flex for two reasons, first was that, although you probably can do much of what Flex does in HTML or with an appropriate toolkit, Flex is designed for attractive and compelling user experience and has available all of Flash. Plus the development environment and available widgets make it easy and fun to program. I don't want to spark a religious war about HTML vs. Flex, so I'll leave that there - it works for me and my application and customers.

Second, and more important, was that it balances the processing load more towards the client which means my server architecture can be optimised just for serving the content and persisting the data. Most of my business logic has migrated across to the client. Having spent many years in classical architectures I think this is a huge step forward, but I can already her a chorus of disagreement about that too.

My word of caution about Flex comes from needing to adopt the right architecture for your client code. It is pretty easy to create a huge and badly performing app with Flex if you get that wrong. Make everything event driven and apparently asynchronous and you should be OK ('apparently' because the Flash player is single threaded). And that is downside 1, the single threaded Flash player sometimes causes issues.

Downside 2 is perhaps more serious and that is locked down desktops in corporate environments. Quite often your target audience won't have administrative rights to their computer and will have either the wrong flash player or none at all. This is particularly true in public sector organisations and the military, so if you are heading there I would test carefully the presence of Flash amongst your users.

Other than that I heartily recommend Flex. It's also a great thing to have on your CV!

HTH

Answer 5

1. Yes, the scale and type of project fits.
2. Immaturity of frameworks and libraries you might depend on. Immaturity of IDE's.
3. Silverlight, JavaFX.