Wednesday, December 22, 2010

reasons I will not use flex for

This is not an anti-flex post but the list of issues I *personally* dealt with and would avoid using flex for. Of course there are work arounds for all of these but I would expect them to be available out of the box.

1. Flex does not send "cookies" header while "file upload" using FileReference.upload() in Firefox.

2. If you make a http request from flex app, you only get success/failure and not HTTP status code.

3. Flex application compiles into "swf" files which are rather large for a web application and for the people using your website with lower bandwidths it becomes terribly slow. (it may sometimes need to download the flex framework files also if the person has never visited a site having flex content before)

some more demotivator types..

4. It simply can not be debugged on the fly in the browser. For javascript, now a days you can do all the debugging on the browser itself and it becomes so easy.

5. FlexBuilder commertial license costs money :).

6. Personally, as a developer, I would rather want to learn/master javascript than actionscript.

7. World is pushing HTML[5]/Javascript/Css[3] hard. Javascript browser implementations, UI libraries/widgets are only going to get better and faster.

We chose flex over html/javascript because it seemed that it would be easier/quicker to create cool UI(RIA) with flex than html/javascript. But, now we believe same and more cool UI are possible and easily doable(with so many options, jqueryUI, GWT etc) with html/js also.

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