[OSGeo-Discuss] RE: [Majas-dev] [Majas-users] Flex in geomajas

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:01:34AM -0300, Leonardo Mateo wrote:
> Ok, here's my grain of sand. I don't know what geomajas is, so I don't
> know how much Flex would impact on this.
> I've been working with Flex from the past two years or so, now a days
> a little less intensive, but still working. I've worked with two or
> three map API's for Flex and I have to say that totally worth it.
> About the speed, I haven't seen any benchmark bu ActionScript3 should
> be way faster than JavaScript and should work fine with large amount
> of data, wether you use raw XML or some other technology such as AMF*.
> About the downside Pieter mention there, I think in these days, the
> Flash plugin is something you should have on a browser, it is not a
> strange requirement anymore. 

However, in corporate environments (enterprise) or in the case of Open
Souce geeks, you have two groups of people who commonly dnt have Flash
installed -- the former due to to corporate policy, the latter due to
sometimes esoteric operating systems and setups that don't support it.
(For example, Flash, the last time I was aware, still didn't natively
work on 64bit...) 

> Anyway, my opinion is: "go for it if your UI is complex enough", Flex
> allows you to build a really complex, advanced UI with advanced
> widgets that looks, performs and behaves really good. Programming AS
> is way much easier than JavaScript (I come from a JS background too)
> not to mention modularization possibilites with Flex Modules and
> Libraries also, you should reduce the browser compatibility issues in
> a 95% at least.

So long as you are willing to completely ignore that Flash now has
multiple players, anyway. (Gnash is becoming competent enough that it's 
actually usable, and in some cases, more so than existing Flash
clients.) With the opening of the Flash spec and the existence of
multiple players, if you actually care about hitting the niche markets
currently served by non-Adobe Flash, you're in the same boat as you are
in the browser world.

At the moment, Adobe Flash marketshare is big enough that you probably
don't need to care about this for business reasons -- but that used to
be the case for IE, too.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer