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I have always been a fan of HTML, and not much of a fan of Flex, but since i've been put on a Flex project at work, i've had to learn Flex.

I dont actually know why i didn't like Flex before, maybe because of Adobe, but anyway, i've had a pleasent suprise with Flex, I love the way that Flex is an XML implementation of ActionScript, I think its a elegant way to save some lines of code and easier development, also the way that it can run on any platform as its a film(OK, yeah, you need Adobe's Virtual Machine for it to work). And the access to services using remoteObject for me is as good as it gets, with implementation of AMF(Action Message Format) in Java, .NET, PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc..

Ok, it might seem that i'm all for Flex, but i know it has some down sides(like everything), for example if you you Flex for a web page, it is slower to load as it has to load the entire flash file, and its not a great friend of a browsers, f.e the browser cant save passwords or save links to certain pages(Flex apps can be deep linked).

Now, as a fan of HTML, i must say that HTML5 to me, isn't what i expected. Devices and hardware that promised to be the bright future of HTML5 are not allowing us to do the things we want to.

Anyway the reason of this question is, that i am very suprised about the potential of Flex, and i just wanted to ask why so many people are against Flex and give such bad reviews? i mean, i have seen some posts that literaly destroy Flex making up absurd statements.

Juanpe
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    Welcome to the world of programming, Gary. Many developers have their pet platforms, and will decry all others as the work of the devil. Use what works for you, and don't let anyone talk you out of it until you can see a proven advantage to switching. As to your question, yup, it really is too broad, so I had to flag it as well. Read http://www.stackoverflow.com/help – CodeMouse92 May 21 '14 at 16:49
  • Ok i will delete the question, sorry about making it to broad, didnt really know how to ask it, but really wanted to know why flex is so attacked. Sorry again – Juanpe May 22 '14 at 07:11
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    Granted - it's not a "specific" how do I do X question, but honestly sometimes these need to be asked. It is after all a convenient way to share information (!) hello people, that's what we're here for. Jason +1 for pet platforms - the dude Abides. -1 flagging it - the dude minds. – Mike Petty May 23 '14 at 05:17

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The only reason to write an "answer" is that it would be broadly stated that "there is no true answer" :)

As any technology, there are benefits and there are drawbacks. It depends on what's your main goal.

Flex is really heavy. If you want a simple CV like page, with few buttons and images, the Flex framework would load a lot of stuff in order to get things working. Talking about heavy UI web application (like a CRM tool, or CMS) - Flex tends to leak some memory or at least get a lot when running. It has tons of features that you might like, but must be user carefully. For example you can listen for variable change - this is not a common AS3 feature, but a heavy overload especially when you do it many times.

On the other hand Flex is pretty awesome when talking exactly about heavy UI applications. The built-in components and views are one of a kind. They save tremendous amount of time when you have to do online shops or nested views with special item renderers.

So there is no true answer why Flex is good or bad. Some people like it, other don't. The only true thing is that it depends on the project itself.

Maybe most of the people that hate it haven't actually used it for it's purposes and tried to make a three views web page with a WYSIWYG editor.. So they are not happy with the knowledge and time needed in order to do such in Flex.

It can't be compared to HTML5. One is for applications, other is for fancy roll-over effects.. :)

p.s. Sorry to say it, but I'll vote for closing this question as it's too broad and there is no clear answer. Better place for such kind of discussions are forums for Flex.

Andrey Popov
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    All true, Andrey. I've had people try to talk me out of Adobe Flash. I keep saying the same thing to them: HTML5 and Adobe Flash are apples and oranges, especially in the world of application development. (I also second the flag.) – CodeMouse92 May 21 '14 at 16:50
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    Flex gets a bad rap because of a now famous dead guy b!tched up a storm how Flash sucked on mobile. It wasn't even designed for it in the first place. But because it's basically Flash's cousin - because he declared "thermonuclear war" on cars - trucks suck too. Two different tools - two different objectives. – Mike Petty May 23 '14 at 05:24
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Flash is true clientside programming and that's what makes it clearly superior. Everybody that says anything different just doesn't program or doesn't know what Flash is. In Flash, you can create one app (one set of code) and deploy it to desktop, ipad, iphone, android, windows tablet, everything (compiled to native app files).

Show up at your next interview for an ios app developer and show them how they'll get android too for free.

You can even export all your artwork for use in HTML5. Adobe now has Edge products which create HTML5 animations and code.

moot
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Again, you can use javascript if you want to, but it is simply vastly inferior in every way.

Javascript and html5 are barely able to do a few things that we've been doing in flash since around 2005. It's playing catchup. Even if both could absolutely everything any css coder dreamed of, it would still be inferior because of the way it is structured.

You'll have no problem taking what you've created in Flash and converting it to HTML5 IF you program. If you don't code, there's adobe software to hand everything to somebody that does.

This is not an attack on anybody's credentials or opinions, but, you have to be a professional Flash designer and programmer to know what Flash is. Lots of people know what other people do with Flash, they know the applications created with it, but they don't understand why Flash is different.

moot
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  • I forgot to include that I've been a professional web dev since 98. Before Flash got strong, I did regular javascript driven, liquid/fluid html sites, and backend work like shopping carts and inventory cms. – moot May 27 '14 at 05:31
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I prefer the openness of javascript, HTML5 and CSS3 because the more we work on it, the more it gets powerful.

There are any kind of complex applications being written in javascript and HTML5 out there. It's truly universal and open, works on both server side and client side. And the gap with native code's performances is decreasing.

For the records, I wrote my JS/HTML5/CSS frontend app framework. It took 4/6 months to address the many bugs all the different browsers have, but since now that this work is done I'm developing HTML5/js apps so fast that my fellow native iOS co-worker can't believe his eyes. I'm planning to integrate it with meteor.

Apart from mine, there are other HTML5,CSS and javascript frontend/backend/mixed/mobile/desktop/database libraries out there that you can use and love. Who says that you can't do complex stuff with it is just so wrong, or simply have other preferences. Off course I'm not saying that javascript beats native (yet), but I feel like in a few years native languages could be mostly used for OSes. Adobe even released Adobe Edge Code that is an amazing code editor purely written in javascript (actually, it's a fork of Brackets, which I love).

The resources on the topic are too just much to list, but here's a link: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/21/introduction-to-full-stack-javascript/

So, of course it's a personal choice, but mine is for HTML5.

Francesco Frapporti
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  • This is why i posted this question, to get honest answers from people that use HTML5 or Flex, the question is very broad? Maybe, but i think the question is on topic, the only problem is it has so many different posible answers, but still dont think it deserves negative votes. Thanks for commenting – Juanpe May 22 '14 at 15:17
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    Francesco you are right that JS is very powerful. The thing I don't like is that there is almost no decent IDE for development. There are some that try, but as JS is duck typed, it's very complex. Another **huge drawback** is that it's unbelievably hard to use JS in a team of developers. That's because there are many ways to do one thing, and everything is pretty anonymous, so combining parts of a code written by different developers is.. I can't even say it :) Haven't heard of team bigger than two, and I've worked in team of 10 with AS3 - all went well.. – Andrey Popov May 22 '14 at 17:37
  • @AndreyPopov, I think you just need to user a proper framework to your code well organized and separated. There are dozens of them who do an excellent job and can allow you to use any particular programming pattern. There are very large teams producing stuff with javascript. – Francesco Frapporti May 22 '14 at 17:47
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    I agree there are some teams of great professionals. Unfortunately, commonly this is not true :) Please provide some samples, I find that interesting. And I don't hate JS - I just don't find it mature enough, especially when talking about mobile development. Accessing hardware, talking about sleek performance and complex *extendable* code - few years must past before I accept that. TypedScript is pretty promising, I agree! I just hope all browsers would finally support all features and have similar VMs (interpretators) – Andrey Popov May 22 '14 at 17:51
  • Andrey, you will meet plenty of developers who work in teams in conferences. Widely used frameworks are dozens, among them you'll often see sencha (extjs), backbone, angular, meteor, knockout... The problems you are talking about are not from the language itself, but from the pattern in use. EDIT: added link in article, if you want to read (but you'll find so many others) – Francesco Frapporti May 22 '14 at 17:59
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    As I said - I don't deny there are people that do it that way. But they are very few compared to the common situation. From the image of the article, I can't imagine 5 people working on a project, having equal knowledge in RequireJS (Backbone), NodeJS and FrontEnd development. It's so broad that having equally good and well bonded team seems like a miracle to me :) I think we should end the conversation here. It's really opinion based, as I still haven't seen a well built huge JS app (or mobile app). Thanks for the article though :) – Andrey Popov May 22 '14 at 18:43
  • Jesus, I just ran down the article.. You need Grunt framework for building, Mocha and Chai for unit tests (because Mocha isn't enough), RequireJS to work with dependencies, Angular/Backbone for front-end.. Not to talk about Node and it's packages.. I can't imagine how much time is needed in order to learn all the features of those frameworks and keep an eye on their Git free (weekly) updates.. It's obvious you are not working in a big team, right? :) – Andrey Popov May 22 '14 at 18:50
  • We've been 7/8 on the same project (15 in total), but now we are down to 4, even if it's true that the biggest part of every job is carried on by single. You seem a bit scared by that article because all of this is new to you, I understand this, but everything in javascript is much quicker and faster than any other language I've seen so far. That said, it's true that the best language, is the one the developer knows more. I don't pretend to change your mind. But my opinion (very widely shared, today) is that javascript is now mature for large scale applications. – Francesco Frapporti May 22 '14 at 20:21
  • Francesco - what has been done in the way of virtualization for JS? With Flex it's a given - data models can hold 10,000's of rows of data with no performance degradation on the UI. Is there a UI set that incorporates this or is there another framework to handle this? – Mike Petty May 23 '14 at 05:30
  • It's another broad subject and really depends on single cases and implementation: I'm direct witness to 20 folds faster performances switching to a streamlined interface with a non relational db (and it was mongo in our case), so perhaps you want to narrow it down to some specific case? EDIT: I would really love a test case, where we could try the two languages and see if there's a real performance difference. – Francesco Frapporti May 24 '14 at 01:31