Dave Johnson

Today a few of us at Nitobi had a sneak peak at some really cool Flex technology from the team over at Adobe.

Essentially we saw how one can go beyond the ExternalInterface feature in Flash 8, which only supports function calls across the JavaScript / ActionScript boundary with primitive objects, to a situation where one can access Flex objects directly from JavaScript and vice versa. This is being called the Flex-AJAX Bridge or FABridge. All the info (with Alpha download) can be found here on Adobe Labs.

Today this means that AJAX developers can better leverage native Flash capabilities such as local storage (hopefully it is faster than ExternalInterface), cross-domain data access, and sockets. It should get really interesting when the AJAX Client for Flex Data Services become available (later this year) which should provide data persistence, pub/sub, push, etc.

As a component vendor, I like the idea of marrying the benefits of both AJAX and Flex - it particularly makes sense for doing anything with charting etc. With the SVG/VML/Canvas battle for vectors graphics dominance pretty much going nowhere (and they can’t even do video or audio), Flash is the best option for rich media that works on a large majority of today’s web browsers. It was a good move on Adobe’s part to provide some incremental benefit for AJAX developers rather than trying to push a full Flex framework where the open standards of the AJAX technology stack rule. Something like XAML, which is Microsoft’s next generation declarative user-interface language, will have a tough time for that exact reason.

Flex seems to be shaping up into something that should, in the near term at the very least, be a great addition to the AJAX developers toolbox. I can’t wait to get into the guts of it - just as soon as Grid V3 is done

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Web2.0, AJAX, Flash, 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.