Pros and Cons of Adobe Flex as a Web 2.0 Framework

Question

I came across the Adobe Flex framework one day. After watching http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp/'> the demo of Flex, it looks to me it is a bundle of different Ajax controls. I have no working knowledge of Flex at all and know very little about Flex. Therefore, I would like to hear from the developers here with some Flex experience to explain a bit more pros and cons of this Framework. In particular:

• How productive it is to program in Flex compared to the .Net + Silverlight?
• Any technical advantages over other frameworks?
• Any disadvantages ?
• Does it have any known scaling issues?
• What kind of web servers can it be hosted on?
• Any other things I should be aware of about Flex?

Answer 1

• How productive it is to program in Flex compared to the .Net + Silverlight?

Way more productive than Silverlight as it has a much richer and capable control library. Silverlight is rapidly gaining ground here though. I think by the time SL 4 comes out they will reach feature parity, maybe even SL 3.

• Any technical advantages over other frameworks?

If you can create it in Photoshop, you can pretty much do it in Flex with the help of the Flash drawing API. If you want to build very interesting data visualizations (tree/node diagrams, such as an org chart) you can do this Flex without a ton of work.

• Any disadvantages ?

There is no server-side component to ActionScript so you need to find a way to pass data between Flex and your backend, be it Java, .NET, PHP, etc. There are libraries out there to AMF remoting with just about any backend which makes it easy. But as far as the objects you pass between the two, you need to maintain both or use a code generation tool to create AS3 classes from your backend classes.

• Does it have any known scaling issues?

Flex is simply a presentation technology so this question doesn't really apply.

• What kind of web servers can it be hosted on?

Again, only a presentation technology. It compiles out to a SWF file that is loaded by the browser over HTTP and then executes inside of the Flash Player plugin.