Postby bradford.taylor » Thu Dec 17, 2009 9:11 am
The main audience targeted for the Administrative Tool are non-technical Marketing and Administrative personnel. We wanted to provide a very rich user experience for these people. That was our goal with the Administration Tool.
You can get very rich experience from GWT and other Javascript technologies. There are some drawbacks to using this strategy. The first is difference in behavior in browsers. Although it's a simple matter to take into consideration, the fact that extra time has to be spent coding for these considerations increases time to market. This brings me to another major drawback: time to develop. These libraries are powerful but still require significant effort to develop rich, application like, experience in.
The Flash player has an incredibly high market penetration. If you've used youTube you have Flash. Flex is an API on top of that technology that provides libraries for application features. A very rich experience can be coded in relatively short amount of time, even compared to GWT, using Flex. It also has the added benefit that it will function the same on all browsers. Finally, you can develop very customized behavior of components in Flex without re-writing current components it provides.
We certainly recognize that others might want to implement an Admin Tool in other technologies which is why we have a separate project for server-side Admin components.