I found a few extra minutes and decided to read through an article I wrote last summer titled, From Java to Flex. I hope that isn’t as narcissistic as it sounds, but I like to continue to learn and evolve and I thought I would see how much I still agree with myself.
Well, I made it to the second paragraph before I had to disagree with myself, “… developers should be considering the adoption of Flex is the maturity of the framework.” It is hard for me to argue this point since I just blog about the Flex Immaturities. I still think Flex is worthy, and would argue that the wealth of off the shelf components for Flex makes it mature in a certain way. The API’s are somewhat immature, but so many “UI Frameworks” don’t offer any real component library, so this is a big help in Flex.
I did a decent little review on LCDS. Since writing the article, Adobe open sourced BlazeDS, which was an important step to give the community another open source option for remoting with Java backends. BlazeDS does breakdown with any large scale push deployment, but this was still an important step forward.
Another thing that stands out is that I have the standard Adobe pitch in there that ActionScript is ECMAScript. I have since concluded that this a silly pitch. All I can figure on is that it feeds Adobe’s marketing claim on the large number of people who know their programming language (i.e. because they include all the JavaScript developers). I think they should scrap this and start making the language better with abstracts and private constructors.
I don’t spend much time on AIR in the article. I do see that AIR can have value, but I still see it as a weird fit for so many applications. I guess I just don’t see it as much of a game changer as Adobe does. I kind of like David Heinemeir Hansson’s take, You’re Not on A Plane.
I still strongly believe that Flex is a natrual extension of Java. I am going to write a full post on that, so I wouldn’t go into that here. I guess I still really like Flex. I have seen more of its warts, but it still the best option I can find, as it offers a full suite of components essential for building enterprise applications. This seems like a trival point, but I believe it is the key. Shouldn’t all UI frameworks offer a full suite of components?
