What has made Adobe Flex more “acceptable” than its predecessors? - apache-flex

Question

I have been building enterprise software for the last 10 years. In this time we have seen enterprise applications move from client server to thin clients. We have also seen the move to hosted solutions, albeit under a few names (asp, SaaS, cloud computing). With all these changes the impetuous has been mainly from driven from the IT department not the end user. In the first rounds of these revolutions the user experience was reduced in the name of single point of management and reduced desktop footprint.
During this time there have been many attempts to give the user a rich experience while still satisfying the crotchety IT department. The first was by the industry leader Microsoft in the form of the ActiveX control. The guys from Sun then followed suit with the applet and then more recently java webstart. All of these solutions seemed to scratch the itch but never gained wide expectance by the more stringent IT departments.
Then flex came on the scene from Macromedia. What did they do differently? Is it sustainable? Does Microsoft’s emulation with Silverlight prove they have changed the rules of the game? Will Web programming be changed forever?

Answer 1

Adobe have succeeded because almost all users of the main browsers on the main platforms already have installed the only runtime component required for Flex; which is the Flash player. The Flash player has already demonstrated that it isn't a vector for Bad Stuff; it runs in its own sandbox in the browser, isolated from the hardware and the OS. So no new (and potentially dangerous) software is installed.
There exists a substantial developer community for Flash technology, and the addition of some new controls in Flash, and maturity in ActionScript for writing software, has tipped it over the threshold for being fully useful as a RUI.
(Activex is Windows-0nly; Anything in java is perceived as destabilizing and too heavy; and java hasn't managed to wangle its way into ubiquity, nor will it probably ever do so. So both generally get installed by edict, rather than user choice. This in spite of the fact that Adobe is probably the most disruptive source of unrequested "update-checkers" and other near-malware we deal with in our ecosystem.)
Microsoft started out with Silverlight pretty aggressively, requiring only the installation of the equivalent of the Flash runtime; but it's not ubiquitous even on Windows machines yet; penetration to other platforms is quite a way in the future; and MS hasn't proven to have the political smarts to appear harmless yet. But don't count it out. I think they've moved a step back by switching to .NET languages (with a limited CLR) for development; this seems to me to be the same strategy that has deoxygenated their WinCE strategy; but again we'll see. But at least they have made an obvious move away from language agnosticism to appearing to want to coerce developers into .NETland.
Web programming is changing forever one way or another; users will demand a better, more fine-grained UI; there's no perfect answer in sight yet, but at least there is competition for hearts and minds. I think the most encouraging signs come from Microsoft's strong move into platform-neutral stuff like MVC, Iron Stuff, and increasingly unpolluted code streams to the browser.

Answer 2

My take on Flex's success:
1- Adobe made the right move in opensourcing not only AIR, but Flex, the Flash VM, and the PDF standard now as well.
2- Flex's rich Flash heritage (it runs on any Flash enabled browser) means that the vast majority of browsers already support it and do not need to download a large plugin to access it.
3- Adobe embraced all the major server-side technologies and provided support for them so that a PHP. MS, or Java shop would all feel comfortable using Adobe's client side technology.
Previously, Flex was closed-source, expensive, and even relied on a server-side installation, which negated it's reach even though the Flash client was so widely available.

Answer 3

YouTube and the general ubiquity of
Flash video entrenched the Flash
player into over 95% of the browsers
that are accessing the public
Internet.
Incorporating Flex GUI for form
design with widgets and an extremely
well designed GUI SDK was a major
turning point for the Flash player.
Flex 2 and Flashplayer 9 were the
tipping points of when this
technology really jelled. Enterprise
developers began to quickly realize
that this technology was just the
right approach for doing their
applications. (At JavaOne in 2006,
Adobe Flex 2 was the most impressive
and pivatol technology that I saw
there.)
The Flash runtime has just enough
stuff to run RIA GUI well in a web
browser sandbox setting - Java
applets required the full JRE (about
16 MB). The Flash runtime was a much
leaner and smarter design for its
intended purpose. (Sun has only now
begun to remedy this for Java via
their JavaFX and redesigned JRE that
can download a few MB as sufficient
to run a web applet. They don't have
anything like YouTube Flash video to
drive their installations, though.)
Writing Flex RIA applications is a
very leveraged experience compared
to writing old-school web
HTML/JavaScript AJAX apps. Can
achieve a great deal more and have
less effort to accomplish such.
Adobe bolstered Flex with other
important pieces, such as BlazeDS
(and now they're cooperating with
SpringSource to make BlazeDS and
Spring-Framework a smoother
integration).
The single-thread GUI in combination
to async service calls (or
messaging), and ActionScript3
closures is great programming model:
Flex Async I/O vs Java and C#
Explicit Threading
Likewise, Adobe Flex has a great
implementation of properties,
events, and databinding.
A declarative language, ala MXML, is
indeed a better approach to
describing a form (what is
essentially the view in the MVC
pattern). It is more concise than
equivalent imperative ActionScript
code that would accomplish the same
thing, and thus clearer. The
hierarchical structure of MXML
script tends to naturally match well
to the panel/widget construction of
views as well.
With Flex RIA approach, the MVC
pattern can be implemented
completely on the client tier. Web
frameworks that implemented MVC in
the middle-tier - with the
presentation layer executing in the
remote client-tier, was a
fundamentally flawed approach to
MVC. MVC should be done right at the
tier that is directly user-facing.
(Once again, Adobe Flex does things
right architecturally.)
Despite that HTML/DOM/JavaScript is
considered the pervasive standard of
the Internet web, the Adobe Flash
player is actually a more ubiquitous
and consistent standard - spanning
different browsers and operating
system platforms. The
HTML/DOM/JavaScript standard is in
actuality a fragmented mess that
grows more fragmented everyday as
Google and Microsoft drive different
directions on things regarding the
web browser. Adobe Flash player ends
up being a wonderful end-run around
this dilemma. It's a great
programming experience for the
coders and has sufficient ubiquity
for the business suits.
Adobe is smartly well supporting the
major platforms of Windows, Mac OS
X, and Linux. They pay special
attention to the Linux platform.
This will pay off in the long term
as developers are already settling
on Linux to do their development
from, and it's used extensively for
servers hosting their middle-tier.
Adobe's recent 64-bit Flash player
for Linux is just a marvel. They
already have AIR 1.5 available on
Linux. They are doing a decent job
there of supporting the platform
that the developers care about.