Flex

I’ve been reading a lot about flex lately. I’ve even done some small applications (even 2 for some customers.) I have to say, the more I use it, the more I like it. I know there are major drawbacks to using it. But in the end if you have to build an application that’s not available for the public why not build it in Flex.

One thing I don’t understand is : why isn’t there more support for handheld devices? I know that adobe is pushing support for handheld devices, but why isn’t it widely adopted yet? I understand that microsoft will try to push their Silverlight stuff first, but vendors like Nokia,HTC,RIM , why don’t these guys start introducing it onto their smart phones? Okay that you don’t put it on a regular phone, but on your high end models it should be possible?

Anybody got an idea if it runs on the freerunner or the nokia tablet?

3 Replies to “Flex”

  1. Eh … what does Adobe have to do with flex, and why wouldn’t you want to use it?

    If you need a lexical analyser, flex is about as good as they get. I use it for any application where I need to parse input. It’s much, much, much easier than hand-rolling scanners! Sure, there’s a bit of a learning curse, but as you discovered, this isn’t too bad. I think you get much more maintainable code with flex than by handrolling.

    I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to use it or couldn’t use it on embedded devices? The output is just C, right?

  2. Uhm I think you are talking about another flex. I’m talking about flex.org this is a project that Adobe started and recently made opensource. It outputs flash files that are standalone applications.
    I prefer using this over Dojo,Gwt,prototype,… the javascript frameworks. Reason is pretty simple. Flex is a vm running inside the browser. The new javascript engines are still slower and the old ones, well you can’t even compare. Another nice thing is the fact that you can send your data binary to your Flex client applications. So if you want to send 20.000 records to a table, you could do this over a regular connection within a couple of seconds. The user could then filter and sort on his client. I tried this using Dojo, it crashed my browser every time 🙂

  3. I see … Indeed, this is a very different sort of “flex”. Very clever of Adobe to name a program after one which has been an established value for about thirty years…

    No, this “flex” is not for me. 🙂

    I can recommend the “real” flex though!

Leave a Reply to fix Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.