It seems that anytime you become an advocate for a given technology everyone wants to tell you about their experiences with it. This can of course be good and bad – depending on whether or not their experiences are positive or negative. I have been a fan of Adobe Flex since seeing a few demos of what one could build with it about a year and a half ago. At times in my career, I have acted in a technical sales role and often felt disappointed in the final results of the applications we were able to build using traditional Java web frameworks. They have gotten better in recent years, but are still constrained by the traditional browser based technologies. After a bit of playing with Flex, it was easy to see that this was a technology that would allow me to wow customers and users, and I began singing the praises of Flex.

At this point, the RIA landscape does have a number of other serious players (Silverlight, Curl, JavaFX, etc…). I have been primarily focusing on UI frameworks that have a client-side runtime. I am personally convinced that traditional browser technologies aren’t ideal for building rich applications. That doesn’t mean they aren’t ever appropriate, but if your deployment allows for dependence on a client-side runtime then using one of these platforms is ideal. My interest in all of the RIA platforms has been growing, but I have still been spending most of my time focused on Flex. A couple simple reasons have kept me on this path:

1. I have been doing some development for a consumer facing application, and deploying to the Flash Player is still the best option, as virtually everyone has the runtime.
2. We are doing some work at Gorilla Logic to enable our GXE product to provide rapid RIA prototyping support using a UML model as the backend (absolutely no code), and we are initially targeting Flex as it appears to have the largest developer community that could benefit from this tool.

Anyhow, these two applications have kept me busy with Flex as of late, and finally allowed me to really immerse myself in Flex code that I actually want to ship someday. Trying to build a “real” application always brings out the warts of a technology, which are usually easy to avoid when you are just looking at smaller portions of code. So, I thought it was time to do a series of posts capturing my first hand experiences with Flex – capturing both the strengths and challenges I have encountered with Flex.

I have two simple goals… First, I would like to capture an accurate picture of what Flex development currently looks like. Second, I am hoping the community will let me know where I am lost – where there might be a better way that I am missing…

• Here are the posts to come:
  • Life with Flex: Overview (Wednesday – 6/25)
  • Life with Flex: Compiler (Thursday – 6/26)
  • Life with Flex: Language (Friday – 6/27)
  • Life with Flex: Components (Monday – 6/30)
  • Life with Flex: Testing (Tuesday – 7/1)
  • Life with Flex: FlexBuilder IDE (Wednesday – 7/2)

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