For these developers, Flex was no stretch

By Jeff Feinman

October 20, 2008 —

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.

Easy installs
According to Sandy Scott, principal software engineer at Marathon Technologies, Flex has an advantage over other RIA platforms in ease of installation for end users. Marathon, a Littleton, Mass., provider of disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers, tapped Flex to build a management console for server virtualization that integrates with the Citrix XenServer. Previous consoles had been Java-based, and installing Java Runtime had proved to be a nuisance for some users because it’s a big installation package, Scott said. Flash players, by contrast, are already “near ubiquitous.”

“Our familiarity with Java was probably a little behind the times because we were using Java Swing,” Scott said. “The look and feel we saw out of the box with the Flash and Flex components made it seem like we were getting there faster than we would have if we went back to Java.”

Silverlight, for its part, is newer than Flex and thus lacks the latter’s broad user and knowledge base, and Marathon didn’t want to commit to a Microsoft platform, Scott said.

Kasem Abotel, senior manager of development with SAP’s Business Objects unit, said Flex was SAP’s RIA platform of choice for development of its Spend Analytics application, which lets companies analyze their expenditures. Abotel said Flex is easy to prototype and provides strong debugging capabilities via its Eclipse-based IDE. The platform also makes it easy for developers to use Web and HTTP services and skins.

A “big win” for Flex, Abotel said, is its data binding feature, whereby developers declare a data source for a table, and the data is automatically tabulated and kept up to date. It also provides flexibility within compilation options, he said.

Wish lists
While Flex suited the Discovery Channel application, the development wasn’t a walk in the park, said EffectiveUI’s Owen. The hardest part was figuring out how to make 2D video perform well in a 3D environment, since the application wraps interactive video around the globe. The developers had to figure out ways to cache video on user machines so that Flash would not have to decompress the video frame by frame, Owen said.

As for the process of writing Flex code, Owen said he would like to see some complexity stripped out and more code conventions added. “Personally, I’ve gotten to the point in my programming career where I prefer languages that allow a lot of conventions over configuration—languages that are really dynamic and enforce some structure on your code but enable you to write less code,” Owen said.

He cited Ruby on Rails as an example. “I’ve had a lot of fun learning Ruby on Rails, and I’d like to see Flex move in that direction. I don’t think it’s going to [do so], and it’s not that big a deal, but I like being able to write less code and achieve the same results.

“After you’ve been doing this for five to eight years, you get to the point where you don’t want to have to write all the tedious details anymore. If you can think about it, you want to be able to write one or two lines of code to get your thought into reality so you can focus on bigger and more interesting problems. I wish Flex would just take care of more of that stuff for me and abstract away some of the principles I’m sick of enforcing myself.”

Abotel said his team at SAP found it difficult “learning how to implement accessibility for our products” with Flex. He would like to see Adobe “focus on out-of-the-box support of accessibility” to improve the platform.

Abotel also cited the bulkiness of Flex applications: An empty Flex app produces an SWF file roughly 150K in size, the majority of it due to Flex framework code. “Flex applications may be slow to load initially because of the size of the SWF files,” he said. “However, Flex applications allow for client-side processing that can provide superior interactivity on subsequent interactions by reducing server round trips.”

Marathon, for its part, encountered a few user interface bugs when porting its virtualization application from version 2 of Flex to version 3, but the bugs were resolved quickly, Scott said.

Prior knowledge of Java is helpful for understanding Flex and its basic language because their syntax is similar and they have similar object-oriented characteristics, said EffectiveUI’s Owen. He said he learned ActionScript in about two weeks, adding that any developer who is well versed in object-oriented programming languages, specifically Java or C/C++, should pick up ActionScript similarly quickly.

Because the programming language was easy to work with, Owen said, he was able to focus on solving design problems and caching the video for the Discovery Earth Live application.

Marathon’s Scott agreed that it helps to know your way around an object-oriented programming language, saying, “We already had some expertise in-house with Java, so moving over to Flex has been a piece of cake.”

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

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