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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Is Flex RIA suitable for content-heavy web sites?

Is Flex RIA only suitable for business application interfaces, or apps like Buzzword (a highly functional word processor)?

Often it's believed that a web RIA approach is perhaps not so optimal for content heavy web sites (the blogging and social web sites, etc).

However, there are two aspects of Flex that could be leveraged to integrate content and yield a more dynamic UI.

  • First is that a Flex app can be built like a portal. A Flex form can dynamically load other Flex forms in a nestable like manner. The sub forms loaded can be determined by logic that executes at runtime. The loadable modules can be built as totally standalone components. (Via OSGi, is possible to even bundle these Flex form modules with their own respective Java service layer beans.) They can bind into the hosting portal environment using Flex properties, events, and declarative data binding features. So the coupling layer can be well abstracted so as to not be overly brittle.
  • Second, one can incorporate a popular iFrame Flex control into a Flex form, which, of course, the iFrame can be used to load HTML/JavaScript content. So highly dynamic web content can be integrated into the UI of a Flex RIA application.
  • Thirdly, Adobe AIR has WebKit HTML engine built-in, so an AIR app can also readily make use of HTML content in an integrated fashion.
  • Fourthly, there are already mechanisms that can be hosted in Apache httpd and IIS that will compile Flex forms from source code on the fly. So some aspects of even the Flex RIA could be generated dynamically at runtime. Currently these mechanisms are intended for development phase purposes. The compilation is not considered fast enough for production sites. However, in time this will likely improve.

(Sorry for going a couple of bullet points over.)

In the meantime, my preferred approach is Flex form modularization and Flex control iFrame for embedding HTML content.

1 Comments:

  • you can build some really heavy (features and content) applications with flex. in the development of our application http://www.kizoa.com , we faced several problems due to the amount of data you would normally have in the client/server communication.
    the solution is to initialize the client with the data and to make the same processes/updates on the client and server, so each part assumes that the other has the correct information and it's been updated. you can also add events in the communication process to reflect only the changes for the client.

    while ajax applications need to ask the server the whole same information again and again, flex allows you more data processing, which leads to much faster response times and less server/db load.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6:57 AM  

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