Migrating Adobe flex based UI to newer frameworks

Question

With adobe flex reaching end of life, i was wondering what procedures did you follow or can think or to migrate to latest UI (HTML5 , AngularJS) ?

All the links point out pros and cons of doing it. However I am having trouble understand what steps are required while migration UI tech.

Answer 1

Another option for you might be Apache Royale. This is the evolution of Flex Framework, which allows AS3 code transpile to Javascript/HTML5. Although not perfect, it is an easy way to migrate legacy projects, to keep them running.

For now you will only have to change your UI from the old Flex tags to the new ones, although people are trying to make the old Spark components emulate in the new system.

So basically your is a

If you still prefer to use a new js framework, I found that the easiest for me to adapt was VUE.js

Answer 2

We've done a few of these migrations now and the simple answer is "it depends". There are some questions you'd need to answer:

• Is it feasible for end users to install your application locally, rather than accessing it via a web browser? (Implies little or no interaction between your Flex app and its containing HTML/JS page..). This the answer is yes then the migration becomes a lot simpler as you can either use AIR (per another answer) or you can use a packaged solution to contain and deploy your application as-is (next-to-no work for you, but it's a commercial solution so costs money..)

• Are you happy keeping the source code in MXML/AS3, or would you prefer to move all of this to another language (TypeScript or JavaScript)? If you want to keep the code in MXML/AS3 - and reuse most of it - then Apache Royale is the choice as this has the transpiler to turn MXML/AS3 into JavaScript. If you don't want to use MXML/AS3 then you need to choose a new TS/JS framework..

• Do you have a lot of calls to the Flash APIs, or just to the Flex APIs? Apache Royale do support a lot of functionality that is equivalent to things in Flash (events, utils etc) but mostly it's focussed on the Flex APIs. There are even efforts to try to get a near 1:1 mapping between the Flex components and new Royale ones so that the porting effort is even less. But Flash APIs will often need to be manually converted (e.g. we created a number of implementations in Royale for the flash.media.* classes).

The more I've used Royale, the more I've come to like it. There's a bit of a learning curve to start with but when you realise that any JavaScript component can also be accessed from this, it becomes quite powerful. It's best to provide wrappers for these sorts of things (in the same way that you can get TypeScript definitions for them) as then you get the benefits of the type checking etc from the toolchain.