Adobe’s Flex 2 seems like the realization of some great RAD concepts. I’ve seen this for MS related products: Access, VB, etc. However, it’s my first time seeing it for a clean rich Internet application UI. The fact that you can use it along w/ Eclipse is pretty attractive. If ya have 12 minutes, check out this demo.
Some guy built a Commodore C64 Emulator. Here’s a screenshot below — you can actually play the games. If your interested, check some of the other projects Flex Derby developers built — for some contest Adobe held. Pretty slick!
Flex is awesome but too pricey – unless it has come down recently. Lazlo is a perfect substitute. I am eagerly waiting for Lazlo to finish their DHTML rendering engine (in addition to Flash) – after which I plan on pushing all painful HTML based Web-Frameworks happily out of existence here – assuming Lazlo scales etc.
Yeah, I took a quick look at OpenLazlo too — very nice. My biggest concern with these RIAs is how to describe state via URL.
With the current Web MVC paradigm, you simply encode the URL with the desired/allowed params. In the RIA demos I’ve seen, and based on the article I reference, the Request/Response isnt the primary mode/communication channel. So, the URL doesnt necessarily change to reflect the state of the conversation.
Was I overlooking something?
Laszlo (and Flex) ride on top of the JEE server and so presumably uses JSessionID etc. I believe you have access to the Session from your RIA script. Additionally, you will be implementing Servlet (or based) for REST/JSON style urls accessed from your RIAs.
Xrelix, you’re correct: pricing and having to explicitly compile the view before deployment, cause Flex falls a bit short of the openlaszlo. I looked at their interactive laszlo demo… interesting.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/lps/laszlo-explorer/
Eclipse plugin for OpenLaszlo
http://www.riftware.com/laszlodev/
i’ve gotta check out the plugin – thx. been using the XML editor. Yes compiling on the fly!! The DHTML engine just got released. No longer just Flash.
p.s. I feared GWT would be a hodge-podge of Java to DHTML – But conversing with the creator has convinced me to try it out for sure (i was plannin on anyways but now convinced more than ever). Its got certain advantages over XML programming!!! and seems robust.
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