Praise for Flex and Rich Internet Applications

It’s fun when I come across random posts about the technologies I cover. Sometimes they’re critical, which always helps me learn, but sometimes, as with Ryan Norris, they show that people are totally getting it:

The move towards rich Internet applications certainly pushes us in the direction where this is no longer simply something on a list of things we’d love to have; it’s fast becoming requisite. Web UI is more complicated than ever, and given the business solutions that are fast searching out so-called “Web 2.0″ for solutions for, the time that is wasted ensuring that proprietary solutions to problems of the old web is simply that – a waste. There is no room on the modern Internet for such a myriad of the same low-level integration issues we were dealing with in 2001. I want my UI people to be worrying about how to make interactive, expressive, and low-complexity UI that appeals to all users on the basis of who those users are, not which browser or operating system they use. This is a huge reason why I’ve pushed Flex so hard at the Lab – not only for it’s ability to do things that the web simply is incapable of doing today (true Pub/Sub messaging, for instance) – but because Flex offers our team a single UI framework that is lightweight and distributable across all environments. We aren’t wasting any time figuring out browser quirks or deciding which browsers our complex application needs to support.

That’s what Rich Internet Applications are all about; a better user experience on the web. The goal is to make the experience better for users, with more intuitive interfaces and rich media, but also to make it better for developers so they don’t have to worry about browser hacks or poor development environments.

[tags]Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Experience[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0
  2. Forrester Teleconference: Measuring Rich Internet Applications
  3. Presenting Rich Internet Applications (Ajax, WPF, Flash Platform, Apollo) at Ignite Seattle
  4. Rich Internet Applications
  5. Jeff Whatcott on Rich Internet Applications in the Enterprise
  • http://www.darbymedia.com/ Brent Bonet

    Good on ya, Ryan! This was exactly my thought seven or eight years ago when trying to deal with what was then called “DHTML.” While it may be easier today (I have no idea), the Flash Platform delivers what we need. Pretty consistent, no worries deployment, cross-browser, cross-platform.

    Cheers,
    Brent Bonet
    DarbyMedia

  • Cameron

    I read the blog posted by Ben G. and I have to wonder why MS is always focusing on killing the competition instead of innovating. The discussion seems to be centered on why WPF feature set is better than Flash feature set. In the end, there really isn’t anything new only a 1 for 1 trade. Flash/Flex created something that did not exist before. It was a net increase to the value proposition.