Sunday, March 21, 2010

Working with Flex

For the past few months (since the start of the year), I have been working with Adobe Flex, in conjunction with a Java back-end leveraging Hibernate and Spring. The application under development is basically a public sector financial package, which does not specifically require RIA features, although UX has been established as a critical success factor.

I am following a fairly straightforward path to Flex, I suppose - early work with Action Script and other Adobe technologies lead me to Ajax, and then to Prototype and JQuery, after which I spent several years mired in JSP; and now I am back working with Action Script. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I will write more about my experience in future articles, but specifically I want to raise a couple points of interest here: as a team, we have settled on Cairngorm as an MVC framework. If anyone has any thoughts on Cairngorm and the alternatives, or thoughts about using Flex as a rapid development tool for public sector work. Also, it seems like Flex could easily become a de facto standard for certain kinds of non-RIA development because of the easy Eclipse integration, and I would love to discuss others' experience.

Please drop by and leave a comment - I have been invaded by anonymous posters!