Why care about Flex

ColdFusion is all about productivity. We use ColdFusion to build applications far more efficiently than we could in any other environment or language. This productivity is primarily the product of two different but related aspects of the ColdFusion story:

• The CFML language is highly efficient, providing a clean abstraction for all sorts of programming tasks.
• ColdFusion includes a variety of runtime services, prewritten engines that you can use so as to not have to reinvent the wheel yourself.

Using a combination of these two, ColdFusion developers build all sorts of applications, although primarily these are web applications with web browser front ends. And that's where things start to get messy.

The fact of the matter is that we're using web browsers in ways that their inventors never really intended. Modern user interfaces, the interaction that users are coming to expect, and the real-time back-end integration, are behaving more like a desktop application than loosely coupled web pages—web browsers were just not made to do all of that. And so we've learned to jump through hoops to make up for browser inadequacies—usually writing complex JavaScript and DHTML code (and breaking browser compatibility in the process, and worse).

Think about the applications you are working on or the project you just finished. Try to figure out how much time was spent on the back end (the database interaction and the business logic) and how much was spent building HTML output and messing around with CSS, <DIV> tags, and JavaScript.

And this is not a ColdFusion problem. This issue impacts all web application developers, whether they are using PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, or any other scripting language. What remains the same is that we're pushing the web browser further than it was ever intended to go, and that's where Flex comes into play.

Flex leverages the power, portability, and availability of the Flash Player, essentially allowing developers to break free of the limitations of the web browser, delivering an experience that is more desktop application and client-server like than it is web page. Read David Wadhwani's article to learn more about Flex. Obviously, Flex is appealing to all developers, ColdFusion developers included.

Page 2 of 6

Previous Page

Next Page