Of all of the programming languages I’ve ever used so far, Flex is definitely my favorite.
Why do I like Flex so much? I seriously do believe that it is the wave of the future. Yes, there are some issues that will have to be resolved down the road. At the same time I have been digging into Flex, I have also been studying Search Engine Optimization. For obvious reasons, I would not build a whole site using Flex, unless I had plenty of other high ranking sites pointing to the Flex site. (Web crawlers have a hard time reading .swf files.)
It is my prediction that within a few short years, everybody will be wanting to use Flex to build sites to attract more customers and to close more online sales.
Why Flex?
Here’s my list (and feel free to add your own):
- Flex is easy
- Flex is fun to use.
- Flex is attractive.
- Flex can make a website look and act like a desktop application.
- Flex has great video capabilities.
- Flex has easy charting capabilities.
- Using Flex to read XML is a peice of cake.
- You can use Flex to read and write to databases.
- Flex lends itself well to the e-Commerce space.
- You can use Flex to call PHP.
- You can use Flex to call ActionScript.
- You can use Flex to call JavaScript.
- Building Flex applications that run on ColdFusion isn’t bad at all.
- Flex can be used inside of an already built Tomcat application. (JSP)
- Flex can do socket communication.
- It won’t be long before you will not be able to win sales online unless your web applications can interact with the customer, or unless you can show them some pretty awesome video clips demonstrating your product.
Why not Flex?
Again, feel free to add your own comments.
- Flex is not easy for the search engines to crawl–although there are some work-arounds for this.
- Memory and time for pages to load. However, Flex 3 is supposed to be a lot faster, and less of a memory hog.
In my opinion, if you are trying to sell something, and you want to attract and keep customers and persuade customers to buy your products and services, the pros outweigh the cons.
Feel free to add your two cents.
