OK, I promise this will be the last link dump I do in a while. Really. I promise. Cross my heart. But basically here’s a pile of programmer, web development, and site promotion links.
- Why I don’t get Adobe Flex (this was for you, Jen, as he makes a point I wanted to bring up at the COWPU meeting but couldn’t make it).
- Order pizzas via the command line.
- Six cool things you can build with OpenID.
- How To Make Square Corners with CSS (it’s a joke, people — but a well-written, hilarious one).
- Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques (will be really handy as I try to make a printer-friendly full catalog for our site).
- 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for your Blog (my site’s really in need of a redesign, and I need to implement some of these — anybody up for the redesign task?)
- How to generate targeted traffic to your site.
- CSS Speech Bubbles.
- 10 Minimalist Blog Designs.
- Beginner’s Guide to learning Ruby On Rails
- Safest places to put your Web server.
- Lazy SEO Manifesto.
- MiniAjax, nice looking, free AJAX code.
OK, I’m done link-dumping for a while.
Comments
Flex doesn’t replace Flash. Flex doesn’t necessarily do anything that you can’t already develop in the Flash IDE.
But… it’s a LOT faster to develop data-oriented applications using Flex Builder, than in the Flash IDE.
Does that help? 😉
I think the point of the article, or at least my point, Jen, was why develop something that requires flash that you could do with XHTML, CSS, and Javascript? Granted, it’d be a pain to develop for browsers that aren’t as standards compliant (MSIE, I’m looking at you), but at least it wouldn’t require a plugin.
Just throwing it out there. Flex is dang cool, and flash is installed on dang-near every desktop, but I like playing devil’s advocate 😉
I get ya…
Developer reasoning: The browser landscape is today the simple truth is that XHTML and Javascript lend themselves to the burden of developing multiple versions for multiple platforms (as you mentioned). Flash levels the playing field, so to speak. Because of this, with Flex you develop once and are done – it’s OS independent as long as the client system has Flash Player.
Security and users: The users that won’t install Flash Player are generally the same ones that won’t enable javascript… ya know?
UI development: Using Flex you can more faithfully recreate the desktop application user experience. Sure, you can get close with AJAX but there are some missing items and some work to do.
It depends on the developer, the project, and the environment. Flex isn’t the only (or even the best) option for RIA development. Web developers already have to decide between PHP, Coldfusion, and Ruby (for example). Application developers debate the strengths of Visual Studio, PowerBuilder, and any number of other options available to them!
(you would have loved the debate following the preso, this is exactly what we were discussing!)
Good points, Jen, but one I need to comment on:
Not quite. Modern browsers and OSes seem to be making it harder and harder to install legitimate plugins, while Javascript is generally enabled by default.