The Increasing Power of Flex

For the past few years, Flex has been the background in terms of offering RIA solutions for developers.

Ajax has always been the first option for developers who wanted to have a powerful application. The massive support for this type of programming technique and the open source appeal has always pushed developers towards Ajax.

Flex on the other hand, may not be really a copycat to Ajax but has been seen as a competition to Ajax. The product of Adobe will always be considered by most developers as the second option for developing a powerful RIA.

But the beauty of Flex is slowly creeping into some developers. It is just natural since Flash, which is the basic programming language of Flex, could almost be found everywhere.

It was just thought as a fancy programming language for developing simple games but Flex has grown into a very powerful programming language for videos and other tools that you can find online.

Like Flash, Flex is slowly become a viable solution for developers. The beauty of Flex is that it will give you the familiarity of Flash but you can actually push it harder with the presences of additional tools offered by Flex.

The proof of support for Flex comes in two ways - first is the obvious growing community of developers that have dedicated themselves to Flash and Flex.

The second indication of support for Flex for different developers is on the increasing adoption of Flex to different frameworks.

Flex plug-ins for powerful frameworks such as .Net, SapphireSteel and even Visual Studio are now available.

This will help developers build applications through their preferred framework and develop a Flex based application in no time. Although Ajax will still be part of the major frameworks, the presence of a plug-in will help developers build Flex applications.

The growing support of developers for Flex is also based on the fact that they have an option on what product they can use in developing a Flex based applications. They can go for the licensed builder wherein they will have all the support they can get from Adobe.

However, the presence of an Open Source SDK for Flex will also help developers viable applications.

Although support from Adobe will not be necessarily there, the community of developers will always be more than willing to extend their help to those who are a little bit confused on how to deal with the SDK for Flex.

The adoption of plug-ins from different frameworks and the presence of Open Source will once again slowly push Flex into a ground that maybe better compared to other licensed RIA solutions.

Although it will not change the fact that Ajax will still be the most powerful and cost friendly solution for RIA, Flex is always willing to be the next big thing.

It may still take time before the leader aside for Ajax could be determined but Flex is on the right track of eventually addressing every problem and probably overcoming competition among RIA solutions.