"What about Adobe Flex?", I asked myself few weeks back. When Macromedia was at the helm, Flex was an expensive commercial product and many developers (including myself) stayed away (I mean, the nerve of some companies wanting to actually make money on stuff they produce).

Anyway, as I explore Rich Client options I revisited Flex. Turned out to be a good thing. Adobe has decided to make the Flex SDK free. Meaning you can start creating Flex application as soon as you go through the tons of tutorials and documentations they have online. While the SDK is free, everything elese you have to buy (again, the nerve). If you are a resourceful developer, you should be able to create great application without spending a dime.

As a Java developer, I am interested in client side technologies that work well and are non-intrusive on my backend development. Flex does exactly that. Flex produces Flash client that can communicate with your server using pure HTTP (paid options include SOAP, RCP, JMS, Data Remoting). You write your Flex application in an XML-based dialect that describes components and component layout. Then you compile your code using the SDK's mxmlc compiler which generate the flash file. That is it! I could not believe it was so easy, but it was.

So, keep your interest and skills fresh, go and download Flex and start playing with. In future posts, I will introduce examples specific for the the Java developer so you won't spend hours looking for the feature that does...

Flex Home - http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

# posted by vmatters : 7:08 AM