Something that is becoming clear as the Rich Internet Application (RIA) landscape evolves is that there are some religious wars ahead. One that will be particularly interesting to watch is the Flex vs AJAX race as platforms for building RIAs (not that they are mutually exclusive). And as one might imagine, Microsoft is also competing here with its Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as part of Windows Vista, but Flex and AJAX are the two frontrunners and the basis of most of the street talk.
What's interesting is that AJAX and Flex are not even the same thing. AJAX is a programming technique using multiple technologies such as JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, XML or JSON. Flex is actually a product sold by Adobe to help people build Web applications on top of Adobe's Flash Player, which purports a smaller footprint than Java Virtual Machines (JVMs). With its roots in animation, it is the key technology behind the success of YouTube. However, the end goal with each is still the same: rich, user-empowered applications distributed over the Web with the idea of making the Web more interactive.
AJAX has achieved early success because of its utilization of JavaScript which enjoys a large army of proponents, and a great, well-known implementation success in Google Maps for all to point to. Also, its supporters will tell you that AJAX is open and free, and not tied to any one specific vendor (not sure if these are pros or cons). The main challenges that AJAX has is that there are no real standards and it will continue to be plagued by browser incompatibilities and the associated complexity (case in point, the recent update of Mozilla's Firefox broke many existing AJAX applications). And of course there are well known issues such as the browser back button problem with its various ugly solutions, the inability to bookmark pages, and the difficulty of search engine attractability. Finally, how will marketing beat its chest as "page views" become an obsolete metric?
Flex is a solid alternative. The good news is that Flex 2 provides a fairly rich IDE and there exists a good model of Flash Player distribution with its smaller footprint (versus the JVM mess). With a model similar to Acrobat Reader, a developer can often be helped by a vendor providing a stable player. Of course, because Flex is a product, the bad news is you do have to pay if you want any of the tools like the IDE. I believe currently that sells for $500.
Of course at StrikeIron, we are excited about both AJAX and Flex as well as other Web development technologies such as Microsoft's WPF because they all drive the consumption of Web services and create a need for frictionless, easy, and consistent access to many data sources and business functions available over the Web. That's good for us because that's what we do, so for the most part we are agnostic.
But here's one data point. For a couple of my fun hobby Websites, I found myself gravitating towards Flex. Why? Everything I needed was in one place and with AJAX I wasn't quite sure where to start. And I don't quite have the time to test multiple browsers each with multiple versions and updates. For me, spending a little money was worth saving the time. Hmmm....
Bob Brauer
President and CEO
I would like to present a different concept (Visual WebGui) that provides much wider support both in IDE support (fully integrated WinForms like designer) and in extensibility (easy creation of custom controls) and customization options (the media is still HTML which is much more extensible than working in flash).
Check out this short screencast that shows creating a complex RIA application in no time:
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Default.aspx?tabid=314
Guy
Posted by: Guy Peled | March 22, 2007 at 05:40 AM