Flex your Ajax 
May 10th, 2006
One of the overarching concepts in Web2 I believe is about combining together different web assets, like web services, Ajax, mobile technology, and even the individual energies of users to form something that adds to more than the sum of its parts.
I think that’s partly why a lot of major players have been very accepting of mixed media, and specifically the use of Flex in very high profile web environments.
Slow down.. hold the phone.. whats so special about combining something like Ajax with a technology like Flex? Is this just more marketing speak for ‘buy my stuff‘ ? No.. actually we dont sell any Flex stuff. I think its worth looking at though:
What Ajax provides:
- Easy, incremental improvements to existing HTML-based apps
- Some rich interactivity when combined with client-side JavaScript
- Cross browser, cross platform, “through the firewall” deployment
What Flex provides:
- Richer UI than is possible with Ajax alone
- Native libraries of presentation-layer and busines-layer tools (XML, Charting, Sound, etc, etc)
- Cross browser support (I think flash is somewhere around 95% browser penetration for the modern players)
One of the big challenges in the past has been skills, and the difficulty of ramping up with a new technology.. well, Adobe is moving forward with a free JavaScript interface to the Flex platform called FABridge. I spent a few hours with FAbridge to produce this demo, and I found that while it is still a little thin, it provides a very reasonable way for a JavaScript developer to get immediate value out of the Flex platform.
A similar project for older flash players is Paul Colton’s AFLAX, which I personally love.. what I especially liked is not having to open up the Flash designer to edit the flash file itself.
I’m not suggesting that we should look for ways to do EVERYTHING in JavaScript, but definately this is a great way to get started.
Check out the demo I did to show off our Ajax components working with Flex:
- http://labs.ebusiness-apps.com/
- The Actual Video
- The ‘Less chatter, more APP’ version
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 4:34 pm and is filed under ajax, web2.0, flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 24th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Adobe has made a very intelligent move by continuing to pour investment dollars into developing Flex. Flash technology has finally grown up and is starting to show its true potential.
We’ve built a few websites and applications with Ajax, and it’s been really quite a lot of fun getting back into real user interactivity again. But there’s currently huge limits to what Ajax and Javascript can do from an experience standpoint. I love the smoothness and ease of integration that Flex has.