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Why flex?
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 2:23 pm
by munichconsulting
Any reason that you have chosen Flex for all the admin backend?
S.
Re: Why flex?
Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:56 am
by slp
Same here... why flex?
Having the front end and back end implemented with different technologies makes the system much more complex... It is quite a pain down there when it comes to maintenance.
And it requires different skills... I know java, and I don't want to go into flex (I would rather go for GWT if I needed rich client). And I don't want to be looking for people with the double expertise when I will need someone to take over the system after me...
As a result, I'm coding my own admin tool using spring MVC. And it seems I'm not the only one doing so...
SLP
Re: Why flex?
Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:45 pm
by Dennis
I would have sworn I posted a reply here, but it is gone ?!?!
Anyway, I was wondering if it is possible to share the MVC frontend with the rest of us. Maybe commit it to the project?
Thanx!
Re: Why flex?
Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 9:11 am
by bradford.taylor
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.