I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.
The true object oriented nature of the Flex components is excellent. I am sure there have been a number of “real” UI frameworks over the years that did things like this, but I have never had the opportunity to work with one…. So, being able to actually apply OO principles to UI development has been a pure joy. In addition, the Flex framework provides virtually every component I could ever imagine being needed for enterprise applications. This was always a huge challenge with Java web frameworks, as they always seemed to depend on the community to fill the “gaps,” if you can call the components of UI framework, the “gaps.” Anyhow, there are a few issues that seem to come out of the maturity questions I raised initially. For a few examples:
- The default button implementation does not offer the ability to wrap the text. The fact that the components are really OO paid off here, as we were able to extend the core button and add this functionality. It was nice to be able to be able to work around the limitation this way, but this is clearly a common thing that people would want to do with a button.
- We have been experiencing general difficulty with the ComboBox. It was surprising to have to set things manually – not being able to provide a reference that has the same value, but having to find the actual object in the list and provide him for setting the selected object, etc… The data grid layout breaks out of the columns on us when our custom ComboBox is clicked on… just weirdness.
- Another surprise was that there was no default option to allow users to resize the default components. This would seem quite natural for an animation engine. Anyhow, we used the following to implement resize on our custom title window pop-ups: http://myflex.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/resizable-collapsable-titlewindow/. We made a few tweaks for our custom needs, and did our best to hide this in our implementation so we can easily replace it if we find a better implementation.
Also, here a quick link on styling – since it took me a while to find this: http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/consulting/styleexplorer/Flex3StyleExplorer.html.
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