Macromedia Flex: The Browser Killer

A new server and pre­sen­ta­tion tier frame­work for rich Inter­net appli­ca­tions, for­merly known as "Royale" enters beta phase, planned for 2004 release.

Macro­me­dia Flex, for­merly code-named Royale, will be a com­bi­na­tion of server soft­ware, devel­op­ment guide­lines and other tools to enable tra­di­tional Web appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers to cre­ate com­po­nents in Macromedia's Flash for­mat. You can watch a pretty infor­ma­tive overview here.

If you're like me, you have basi­cally reluc­tantly grap­pled with the whole movie and frames she­bang that Flash comes with. It works, and Flash kicks butt in terms of inter­ac­tiv­ity devel­op­ment, but there's a rea­son why Flash is used mostly for web based eye­candy (dis­claimer: pro­gram­mer bias.)

MM has tried before to take a stab at the devel­oper mar­ket with its clum­sily named "Flash Pro­fes­sional MX2004" which was not aimed at the tra­di­tional core audi­ence of ani­ma­tors, but at peo­ple more likely to come from a cod­ing back­ground. Flex is per­haps the next step — you do not need the Flash inter­face AT ALL.

This is Macromedia's foray into giv­ing devel­op­ers, who are typ­i­cally accus­tomed to work­ing with Sun Microsys­tems' Java 2 Enter­prise Edi­tion (J2EE), PHP or ASP, a frame­work for build­ing attrac­tive, easy-to-navigate inter­faces for the J2EE appli­ca­tions they cre­ate. You could sim­ply use Ultraedit or Home­site to develop with Flex!

Is this new? Nope.

1. Firstly, we already have some of ways to dynam­i­cally gen­er­ate SWFs on the fly (Ming, for instance, which is not really a piece of cake but works like a charm once you get the hang of it).
2. Sec­ondly, there are com­pa­nies that have already attempted some­thing sim­i­lar. Las­zlo Sys­tems for instance has some fab­u­lous tools that offer a sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity — make sure you check out their cool demos. Devel­op­ers cre­ate XML-based appli­ca­tion def­i­n­i­tions that are con­verted into SWFs by the pre­sen­ta­tion server… in LPS's case .lzx, for Flex the files are .mxml. Script­ing is added by way of JavaScript/ActionScript in-lined into the XML.

Not sure how this bodes for Las­z­los, but from our per­spec­tive it is an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment. With MM's typ­i­cal qual­ity stamp, efforts such as this and Flash Cen­tral are well posi­tioned to advance beyond the browser. Don't believe me? Just get a beta ver­sion for your­self and take it for a ride!

P.S. I couldn't help notic­ing that Flex as a name is already taken by one prod­uct for "a fast lex­i­cal analyser gen­er­a­tor". Trade­mark issues?