08.09.08 - RIA Rewards

My old manager at Novell contacted me the other day about moving some web applications to Flex.  He remembered that I became an RIA advocate after I developed a prototype of the GroupWise Instant Messenger using Flex.  The following is taken from an email I wrote to him yesterday explaining my reasons for moving to Flex at EnticeLabs.

I feel very strongly that it has been one of the best decisions we have made as a company.  There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Reduced development time.  I think this comes down to the fact that you don’t have to spend time making your application work on multiple browsers and platforms. At EnticeLabs, we also use standard HTML/JavaScript for parts of our service and I’m always shocked at how much time it takes to develop in comparison to Flex.

2. Customer feedback.  To date, not a single customer has taken issue with our decision (most of them don’t even realize that it’s Flash).  In fact, we routinely receive compliments about our applications from our customers.  Also, since we’re in the business of serving up millions of advertisements accross the web, we have been able to independently verify Adobe’s claims that over 90% of Internet users already have the Flash Player installed.

3. Easy to staff.  I see Flex as a great compromise between web application development and desktop application development.  Although Flex is a relatively new technology, we have had great success in training developers from both backgrounds to develop on Flex at EnticeLabs.  Web application guys appreciate the familiar scripting language and UI markup, while desktop application guys appreciate developing in a stateful environment that provides a comprehensive set of reusable controls.  It doesn’t bother us that Flex developers are hard to find; we’ve found that any good user interface developer can learn to use Flex quickly.

As for Sliverlight, I think it’s going to be one to watch but it has a lot of ground to cover if it’s going to be a real challenger to Flex.  Adobe (Macromedia) has been perfecting this technology for years and feature for feature it has the advantage over all of its competitors for the moment.  I think it’s safe to say that if you’re planning to do RIA anytime in the near future you’ll be much more satisfied with Flex than Sliverlight or JavaFX.

AJAX (or more specifically JavaScript, HTML and CSS), however, is not going away anytime soon.  I’m not convinced that Flex is the answer to all of our web development problems.  It’s about using the right tool for the right job.  Web services that have analogous desktop applications are prime candidates for RIA as are specialized widgets or applets that enhance websites.  On the other hand, services that present pages of searchable content (Wikipedia, blogs, etc.) are not going to benefit much from an RIA makeover (it might actually be a bad move).  Of course, the distinction between these types of services is becoming more blurred as time goes on so it’s anybody’s guess where we’re headed in the long run.