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For these developers, Flex was no stretch

By Jeff Feinman

October 20, 2008 — (Page 1 of 4)

SD Times is talking to developers about what they look for in rich Internet application platforms. Here, three developers explain why Adobe’s Flex was the pick for their projects.

When R.J. Owen was evaluating rich Internet application platforms for a climate data application he was building for the Discovery Channel, he had little trouble boiling down his selection to Adobe’s Flex.

These days, developers have no shortage of RIA platforms at their disposal. AJAX, Sun’s JavaFX and Microsoft’s Silverlight are among the choices.

But Owen, senior developer at Denver-based user interface designer EffectiveUI, liked the 4-year-old Adobe platform’s feature set and its ability to create complex Web applications with relative ease. For developers with a background in Java, he said, Flex’s ActionScript scripting language is easy to understand. And the facility with which Flex enables 3D imaging—critical for Owen’s application—sealed the deal.

Owen’s project was Discovery Earth Live, a Discovery Channel online interactive feature that tracks global climate data. The Discovery Channel gathers information for the application from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, usually receiving the data 24 hours after the updated data sets are compiled. Discovery Earth Live displays a 3D view of Earth that can be “spun” to play video on climate trends in a user-selected region.

“The focal point of this application is the 3D globe and being able to put really rich data onto the globe,” Owen said. “3D interfaces are really difficult to develop in AJAX right now; without an embedded player, it’s difficult to render 3D. And Silverlight doesn’t have nearly a mature enough code base to build something this complex. They’re going to be seeing some pretty basic RIAs for probably the next year.”

By contrast, Owen said, there is a community of Flex and Flash developers who are already building 3D frameworks with ActionScript. Access to those frameworks smoothed the path for EffectiveUI’s project.

Related Search Term(s): AJAX, Flash, Flex, Java, Silverlight, RIAs, Adobe

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