About two years ago I landed a short contract with the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. I don’t know where to access the results from that project anymore (I assume they’re long gone) but it was fun to work on.

Basically, I and a great coworker acting as graphics designer, (Craig made things pretty. I made things work) wrote a front-end visualization to the state’s job-matching web application. It was pretty cool, used animations, visually represented the locations of jobs, whom they were matched to, and jobs and applicants that were most commonly generating matches. It let you view the details of a job as it was matches, and had rolling lists of recently matched job descriptions. All of this was overlaid atop a county map of the state of Indiana. All jobs & applicants using the system had a county data element that let us pin-point where to place the ‘push pin’ for that entity on the map. It was sorta like something off Digg labs, but very specific for our data set and audience.

We did all this in Flex2 using FlexBuilder, and I taught myself enough about Flex and the internals of ActionScript to pull off the project in something like two or three weeks. It was pretty intense, but very fulfilling. After messing around with Flex2 for a few weeks, I had a new appreciation for the crowd that screams, “Java sucks”, and why so many places are starting to incorporate Flash or Flex applications for front-ends. It’s a compelling client technology. A very very compelling client technology.

I won’t go into the details of why I like Flex here. But some of the high-points for my reasons to like Flex are as follows:

• It’s possible to cleanly separate code and layout.
• It’s a real, rich-client (thick-click, RIA, whatever you want to call it) environment. You’re not writing a web-app. You’re writing an application, with a fully functioning component library, that is very cross-platform.
• It doesn’t suck where Java does. Layouts are easy to change / visualize, style, and can be tweaked / changed / altered by graphics designers and programmers.
• It’s support for XML, HTTP I/O, the notion of Bindable object, etc. are so damn compelling it’s not funny.
• You are not constrained by what is possible in a browser, using javascript kludges to interact with a text presentation system hyped up on Mickies.

After we completed our project, I gave a “lunch n’ learn” presentation on the basics for Flex. Included in the talk were a lot of the essentials — where to start, how to get started, event-handling, threading (or the lack thereof in the case of Flex!), and I was overwhelmingly positive about the technology. This was shocking to many of my coworkers in attendance. For years I’ve lamented the misuse of web browsers as client platforms. I had a few of these coworkers nearly pass-out when I told them, “It’s a compelling technology for delivering applications via the web.”

It takes a lot for me to say something like that. And this was before AIR (then project Apollo) was in public beta.

I made a lot of mistakes on this first project. It wasn’t very clean. There’s parts of it I didn’t like then and I hate even more now. But it worked. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was (overall) easy to create. Flex and the FlexBuilder tool gave us the power and flexibility we needed to be successful. Above all else the tools got out of our way and let us do our work. I liked Flex. I liked FlexBuilder.

So I figured now would be a good time to take a look at some of my past mistakes with Flex, get a deeper understanding, and learn the techniques to address some of my biggest complaints from my prior project.

It’s been a week or so now, and I’m happy to report that I’ve learned good, solid solutions to what once were my biggest objections.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.