So everyone has heard of Flash – yeah, the Adobe one(not Justice League!). That is now under the Apache shelter. That bore the brunt of Steve Jobs’ decision to not support it on Apple products. That will definitely feed and feed from Bill Gates coffers as long as it remains hot.
I recently attended an introductory training on Developing Rich Internet Applications using Flex 4. Flex is actually quite impressive – the maturity of the language contributes a great deal to the ease of programming with it – and the richness of the UI it can deliver, on demand. Yes, HTML5 is a definite competitor, but it will be a while before it catches up, and wonder where Flash will be then. Again, the space of operation, and hence competition, is varied for most part, but HTML5 is catching up with the magic that Flex provides, and cross-platform(including iOS) at that.
But Flex is some really good technology that I’d like to talk about. It reminded me of mixture – not Haldirams’ All in One, but something a little more predictable like the Khatta Meetha, say. (to be understood by Haldirams’ snack fans only :)) So the two main ingredients of this mixture would be – MXML and ActionScript. MXML(Multimedia XML) is used to describe the UI, while ActionScript houses the business logic.
So you could describe the UI with MXML, and organise your business logic into ActionScript classes. (using Adobe Flash Builder, which is licensed, but has a 60 day trial – and allows drag/drop of UI controls like buttons, labels, panels etc and generates the code which is very helpful when you are a beginner). On compiling, the MXML pulls in the related ActionScript classes, (along with image files, and swc artifacts – which are components – if any) and compiles into this shippable piece(artifact) called swf(swiff, is how it is widely pronounced) which is understood by the Flash Player.The swf file could then be embedded into an html page and viola! your flash application is ready!
There’s a lot more to Flex than just this – maybe I will talk more about it in my coming posts as I discover it. It does fall short when it comes to SEO friendliness though. But the world of Flex is still a very fascinating one, worth exploring.
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