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David Wadhwani

David Wadhwani

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Listening to Customer Requirements
  3. Target Applications for Flex 1.0
  4. Beyond Flex 1.0
  5. Not Necessarily for All Flash Authoring Developers
Created:
22 March 2004
Modified:
01 November 2004
User Level:
All
Products:
Flex

Is Macromedia Flex the Right Fit for You?

Macromedia has been helping developers build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) longer than just about anyone else. We began in the late 1990s with the Macromedia Flash authoring tool. Through the years our vision has been clear and consistent: Better user experiences lead to measurable business gains. We've seen hotels increase their online reservations by over 80% and business-to-business commerce sites reduce errant orders and returns by almost 25%. Online retailers have seen fewer abandoned transactions during the checkout process and an increase in the effectiveness of upsell opportunities. What drives this? Satisfied end users: They love RIAs because RIAs enhance online experiences and simplify their transactions.

If RIAs built with Macromedia Flash already satisfy end users and increase your return on investment, why do you need Macromedia Flex to build your applications? Macromedia Flash is a fully self-contained tool focused on designers and a certain class of visual developer. Though it has been very successful for this type of designer/developer, many midsize to large enterprise customers we talked to over the years provided us with a very clear mandate: They wanted to maintain the application expressiveness that their users demanded without compromising the existing investments they had made. In short, they needed a product that does the following:

  • Works with their existing technology infrastructure
  • Integrates with existing design, development, and deployment processes
  • Leverages existing employee skills

Armed with these clear requirements from our customers, we set off to build Macromedia Flex.

This article provides a high-level overview of Flex as it relates to these customer requirements. I describe the types of applications Flex 1.5 is best suited to build and share insight into some of the tradeoffs we made along the way.

Note: This article assumes some knowledge of Rich Internet Applications and a high-level understanding of Flex. You can find a good review of RIAs in "Experience Matters," a presentation by Macromedia Chief Marketing Officer Al Ramadan, and a good overview of Flex in, "An Overview of MXML, the Macromedia Flex Markup Language" by Flex Technical Evangelist Christophe Coenraets.

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About the author

David Wadhwani is the vice president of product development for Adobe Flex. Prior to joining Macromedia in 2002 he was the founder and vice president of product development at iHarvest Corporation. While at iHarvest, David led the development and deployment of a web-based knowledge management and collaboration system before selling it to Interwoven, Inc. He also spent approximately four years at Oracle in the early 1990s where he was part of the core team that conceived, designed, and implemented Oracle's first business analytics software package. David is a graduate of Brown University and a member of The Indus Entrepreneurs, and has advised a number of software startups over the last five years.