Macromedia Flex in the News

Thanks to this cold I'm having, I've been giving the gift of time, to catch up with my unread magazines. Browsing through more than 20 issues of several IT-related publications, I've found a couple of articles on Flex, which I wanted to comment here.

The first one is an article by Jon Udell, for InfoWorld (March 29th issue), where he discusses some of the most important aspects of Flex, as a platform for RIA development. Although he makes a point when asking for XPath support to probe complex XML structures, he finds everything else worth a try, at the very least. He declares that working with Flex for about a week left him "hungry for more", and that's something I can relate to, although I haven't had the time to sit and create something from scratch. In general, Jon makes a good job describing how Flex works and who will benefit from the new technology, while sharing his own experience with the tool.

On the other hand, the subtitle for this article from eWeek (April 12th issue) claims to reveal some shortcomings in Flex's first bake, but the article immediately dismisses any, thus making the whole thing completely pointless. However, I would like to comment on something that Jim Rapoza says in the article: he claims that although the combination of MXML, ActionScript and Flash components provides great flexibility, "it is also a potential weakness, as developers will constantly have to bounce between environments when building Flex applications." I strongly disagree: Flex has been designed for collaborative, multidisciplinary teamwork, and it's price tag confirms this. The only thing required to succeed using Flex is good production design. Besides, I believe giving choices to the public is paramount. In the same fashion, not tying the developer to an exclusive editor for MXML allows for broader and easier adoption. I'm currently using DW to edit my MXML files in windows, and the super-popular vi under Linux. There are some weaknesses, but that's not it. Consider Flash Player 7's ubiquity as a limitation, as it is required to run Flex applications; consider the current price as an obstacle for small and mid-size companies... those are weaknesses that should be commented.