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

[Milo van der Linden]

+1 for flex;

I am using a xubuntu 64bits distro as operating system. recently the 
people at adobe released a 64 bit pre-release for flashplayer 10 and it 
works like a charm here. It is good to see that adobe is putting effort 
into 64bit too.

The adobe air platform is also moving to maturity on linux, so that is 
another good thing to guarantee a large user base.

As an example; the french gendarme is completely moving away from 
windows: 
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iU4Lq7tOR_WVOJLZ3IeRaIH03x6w and 
becoms more and more linux based. It seems to may that governmental 
bodies like this could really benefit from a good mapping application 
that is no longer depending on ocx's or other windows only 
architectures. I would not bet my money on microsoft silverlight as an 
alternative to flex.


Mapping with flex would really "light my heart"!

Leonardo Mateo wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Dirk Frigne <dirk.frigne at dfc.be> wrote:
>   
>> Sorry for the cross posting, but I found an interesting mail about
>> performance and webmapping in the majas developers list.
>>
>> Today, Geomajas is written in Java for the server part, and uses Javascript
>> in the frontend.
>> Although the performance is good enough to support a proper amount of
>> editable objects, we always are looking to mechanisms to improve the speed
>> and usability of the front end.
>>
>> Pieter has done some tests with the Flex technology and they are very
>> promising(details in his mail attached).
>> Should it be a problem for distribution that the technology is shipped in
>> the form of an installable plug-in instead of native browser technology such
>> as VML or SVG, or isn't that an issue?
>>
>> And who has experience with this technology?
>>
>> I would appreciate your feedback ...
>>
>>
>>     
> 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, you shouldn't confuse Flash with
> Flex, even when a Flex application is a Flash movie, their are used
> for completly different things and can work togheter since you can,
> from Flex, use resources from an swf made in Flash.
>
> 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.
>
>
> Hope it helps.
>