Andre’s Blog

If you follow my blog you probably know I’m far from a one technology zealot and like to see complimentary technologies playing together for a better end user experience.   We started working on the integration of Ajax vs and Flex a few months back when Adobe first released the FABridge.

Well we’re at it again:)  Dave just put this up:

A Flex/Ajax dashboard to show how Flex and Ajax can work together to make a very compelling user-interface for something like a corporate information dashboard. You can check it out the demo here and an article about the demo here.

Using the FABridge along with the Nitobi Ajax Grid and Adobe Flex Charting, we have created a scenario where one can view monthly sales data and then see the sales details for the month in both a tabular format in a grid and visually represented in a Flex chart.

Hint: Try editing the price data in the right hand grid and watch the chart auto-magically update on the page withough a refresh!

So as you can see in this demo we’ve clearly hit that wall with Ajax, we just couldn’t do that dynamic visualization of data in Ajax.  And as Ryan Stewart points out:

It’s one thing to build part of your application in Ajax, but trying to
present data graphically can be a nightmare. This not only presents it
graphically, but in a way that Ajax users should appreciate - with
transitions and animations that add subtle enhancements to the
application.

Now based on my initial comment about Flex/Flash playing with Ajax you may want to bark up and say: “Hey! Now that you have Flash 9 on the client why no go all the way Flex?”.  Simple, I’m too damn lazy!  I have hundreds if not thousands of existing web app screens built in HTML (ASP, JSP, CFM, PHP, etc) that I’m trying incrementally improve the user experience on using Ajax, and in fact of some of it was already Ajax.  Also, I may even be a bit to lazy to learn Flex, MXML and AS3 although it’s quite user friendly and powerful within Flex Builder.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having these massive “legacy” web apps that I can’t just re-write from scratch just because Flex is more powerful for RIA development.  Why not? Because that would take a long time cost a lot of money and my boss just won’t let me;-)  But now that I have my users happy using Flash 9 maybe I can think about using Flex when we do re-write, but that might not be for another 10 yrs:P  Maybe I’ll have another project sooner that I can use Flex on, who knows?  So whether you’re pro Flex or not we can start see some incremental usage and wider adoption this way, which is great IMO.

Technorati Tags: ajax, flex, fabridge, dashboard, demo, nitobi, adobe, davejohnosn, ryanstewart, ria, flexchart

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX. 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.