The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Macromedia Flex.

This looks really interesting and is similar to XAML in longhorn, but is already in beta.

Is anyone using the beta and what do you think of it?

Mike grace
Friday, February 6, 2004

You can find more info about Macromedia Flex at their Developer Center web site. They have some demos and example code, too.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/

runtime
Friday, February 6, 2004

I recently went to a preview of this exciting new technology and I can tell you now its awesome. The beta at the moment is extremly hard to get on but hopefully in the future it will be more open.

I'm really suprised that the idea of using flash for the presentation tier has not taken off in the J2EE world as much as it could. However with the advent of Flex (which will work with J2EE/Coldfusion and .NET in the future). This may all change. I strongly advise everyone to keep an eye on this. And no I don't work for Macromedia - or I would be on the beta.

Jason Williams
Friday, February 6, 2004

I'm in the beta.

It's damn cool technology. IMHO, it is the missing link we've been waiting for in terms of building rich, usable internet applications. I'm so sick of shipping the user interface back and forth to the user every time anything happens, and maintaining flakey javascript on multiple browsers in order to do something as simple as have a menu bar.

The best part is that it fits hand to glove with the whole Service Oriented Architecture / Web Services stuff that has been going on for the last two years.

An important point is that this is mainly a revolution in IDE / development style. It's been possible to write Flash web applications that talk to a server back end for years, but enterprise programmers take one look at the flash IDE (which is very animation-oriented) and run screaming. What macromedia has done has made some great flash components, and created a very intuitive way to specify those components layout using xml.

anon
Friday, February 6, 2004

Sounds like exactly what I need,

I missed out on the beta though.

Oh well, I shall have to wait and see. It does say on the site that it will be shipped in Q1 so not long now.

Mike Grace
Saturday, February 7, 2004