I'm finally Flex-able
I have to say that I've been around these 20+ years, and I've developed rather large complex projects on just about every tool available. I'm a
deep developer with J2EE, PHP, and .NET Compact Framework, and I've always been very unhappy with the tools we were given to produce
user-interface-heavy applications. For most of my career, RIA meant a hip town in Brazil.
Now, we're being required to deliver RIA, on the desktop or not, and the dearth of good tools is still disappointing. Until Flex. Adobe's really intelligent RIA generator is one of the best things I've ever experienced in GUI tools. It's brilliant approach to achieving the end game is so easy to implement, and there's been so much activity out there, that you simply cannot go wrong with it, if your goal is to create really cool, hip UI's. If you're a Java developer, Flex will become second nature to you in a short period of time. If you're a .NET developer, Flex's use of components to create forms and it's use of namespaces for categorization will be very familiar.
There are too many good things to say about Flex that I can't and shouldn't mention them here, as you can get them best on the product site. I will add a couple experiences that may help you in your decision to use it.
I was working recently at a large financial services firm near NYC that is a Red Hat/JBoss shop with lots of users and over 1000 servers running all sorts of applications. These guys have a real need for immediate visualization of server and network status, and so on the side I developed a little application in Flex that would present JMX data from their JBoss servers in a concise Dashboard.
This dashboard was created with ILog's Elixir plugin, which gives you terrific looking dials, linear reg tools, and charts with no rival.
With very little learning curve, I was able to connect these little guys to a small .ear file I installed to each JBoss instance. As JBoss provides hundreds of metrics available via simple JMX queries, I am able to tell the Flex application to poll each server every X minutes, and set the value on the associated dial or level. With some additional Actionscript magic, we can tell each dial to glow redder if an error condition is neared.
Now, we're being required to deliver RIA, on the desktop or not, and the dearth of good tools is still disappointing. Until Flex. Adobe's really intelligent RIA generator is one of the best things I've ever experienced in GUI tools. It's brilliant approach to achieving the end game is so easy to implement, and there's been so much activity out there, that you simply cannot go wrong with it, if your goal is to create really cool, hip UI's. If you're a Java developer, Flex will become second nature to you in a short period of time. If you're a .NET developer, Flex's use of components to create forms and it's use of namespaces for categorization will be very familiar.
There are too many good things to say about Flex that I can't and shouldn't mention them here, as you can get them best on the product site. I will add a couple experiences that may help you in your decision to use it.
I was working recently at a large financial services firm near NYC that is a Red Hat/JBoss shop with lots of users and over 1000 servers running all sorts of applications. These guys have a real need for immediate visualization of server and network status, and so on the side I developed a little application in Flex that would present JMX data from their JBoss servers in a concise Dashboard.
This dashboard was created with ILog's Elixir plugin, which gives you terrific looking dials, linear reg tools, and charts with no rival.With very little learning curve, I was able to connect these little guys to a small .ear file I installed to each JBoss instance. As JBoss provides hundreds of metrics available via simple JMX queries, I am able to tell the Flex application to poll each server every X minutes, and set the value on the associated dial or level. With some additional Actionscript magic, we can tell each dial to glow redder if an error condition is neared.
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