Synchronicity or good timing?
I've noticed a lot of articles recently about the future of application development and there's a lot of talk about Flex in there. It could just be synchronicity - ie. because Flex is basically my new job I suddenly notice Flex everywhere - or it could just be Year of the Flex. The people at my new employer believe so.
I read this article by Bruce Eckels about the future of Web UIs, which espouses Flex on Flash. People complain that he is being paid by Adobe, which he is now, however Bruce says this article was largely written before Adobe approached him to evangelise Flex.
I used to not be a big fan of Flash, and liked the idea of Ajax, however I see now that Flash is the future. I used Yahoo! Pipes and while it is an excellent demo of an Ajax/HTML UI it's performance is crap. On my Athlon 2500+ (I know, getting old) in Firefox it pegs the CPU at 100% when you drag a component around the grid. Also I'm sure they had to do a lot of mucking around to get it to run on all the browsers it does, and even so it doesn't work well on IE6 which is still the majority browser these days.
I believe Ajax still has it's place for some simple things, like dynamic data lookups for select lists, however for a whole UI you'd make your life a lot easier building it in Flex.
Anyway, I'm allowed my biases now, I'm sure my workmates will encourage it :)
The most recent blog post to capture my attention was this one by Steve Yegge of Google, about the Next Big Language. Most people in the comments seem to think that this language could be ECMAScript, and that was my thought when I read the post. Some people commenting don't know ActionScript 3 or they'd realise that AS3 is a lot closer to the described NBL than they think "JavaScript" is these days. The recent AVM2 VM also has great performance.
So with more and more people discovering Flex these days, and with Apollo coming up for disconnected / desktop apps, I am really looking forward to this new job! I will, hopefully, be getting in on the ground floor (or maybe level 1) of the Next Big Thing, which should be lots of fun.
Who knows, maybe in a few years I'll be speaking at conferences as a Flex/Apollo expert ;)
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