Filed Under: Flex
In February my company, EZMO,made a brave decision. We threw away an HTML/AJAX based product developed over 5 months in order to start from scratch creating a new user interface using Adobe Flex. Nobody in our development team had worked with Flex previously and most of them hadn’t heard about it at all before we decided upon this.
We had to do this because we wanted the following:
Having created a old style application in HTML/JavaScript we had an application which had terrible responsiveness and seemed to be broken most of the time because of it’s fragile state. We evaluated a lot different frameworks and ended up with Adobe Flex. None of the JavaScript frameworks such as Dojo, Yahoo User Interface Library or Script.aculo.us would enable us to minimize hand overs nor enable developers to do features end to end. Standard JavaScript libraries have no tool support to speak of and usually require developers to spend a lot of time before knowing how to best use it. Flex came out on top because:
We set out to recreate the entire application in Flex in just about one month, learning Flex in the process. Our development team consisted of one person with knowledge of front end development, two Java developers and one Flash designer. Obviously we made it, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this. In my opinion these are the reasons why:
The Flex framework enables developers to focus on creating functionality instead of focusing on browser limitations and varying standards implementations in browsers. I have worked with web UI for eight years and it is only now that it is fun again. Flex puts the fun back in UI development because it just works. It’s very much like creating applications using VB or such frameworks. You can focus on creating value instead of ducking for errors coming your way.
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