February 02, 2009
On building Flex-based Application UIs
Just finished reading Tony Byrne's latest blog, entitled "The Case Against Flex-based Application UIs." If there's one thing you can't do, its accuse Tony of not speaking his mind! Tony comes down hard on the trend that Web content management vendors have been following by building their client applications using Adobe Flex.
Flex applications can be rapid to develop and deploy across platforms. Like any development work, poor coding can lead to performance issues, so the ease of development and the relative newness of the technology may be contributing to this perception that Flex is not ready-for-primetime.
Flex can be a great opportunity for organizations to quickly build user interfaces that allow them to do specific actions meaningful to their own use cases. These apps can be built right on top of their WCMS/ECM product. So, since so many companies actually don't care for the form factors that vendors can present, the end user org can in fact build their own UI's much more quickly, saving $$ in vendor implementation costs and licensing fees for these Air/Flex 'client' applications.
Obviously, this approach wouldn't work if there's low/no adoption of the technology. For instance, I'm involved in a global deployment of an ECM right now which is atop the Microsoft stack. While the requirements beg for a rich Internet app supporting Mac and Windows, the customer won't even glance at what Adobe's offering. They'll probably have us build a front end using .NET and AJAX/Telerik RAD controls to support IE on Windows and Firefox/Safari on Mac (Windows as well)...not sure they'd even look at Silverlight.
Perhaps these next gen rich Internet app tools are ahead of their time, but there's plenty of early adopters that are reaping the benefits. Lets see if Tony eats his hat in 2010 :-) In any event, he makes some remarkable points that are countered adeptly by Duane Nickull of Adobe directly underneath the blog in a comment post.
Follow this link to get to Tony's blog.
Posted at 11:45 pm by Joseph Bachana
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Article by Jill Ambroz of Folio Magazine on the rise of the open-source Web Content Management System as a way for publishers to deliver content to their sites. > more
I think Flex can be useful for building front end interfaces for content management, giving the users a comfortable experience. I might be in agreement with you that Flex could be overkill at time of delivery.