Product review: Adobe Flex Builder speeds RIA development

For improving the look and feel of browser-based applications, AJAX technologies work wonders, but RIAs (rich Internet applications) take the browser to a whole new level. RIAs deliver a consistently richer user experience, with functionality and data access more closely approximating native desktop apps.

Adobe Flex Builder 3.0 is an Eclipse-based IDE for building RIAs on Adobe's Flash platform and the open source Flex SDK. Although you could use any text editor to cobble ActionScript and MXML into a Flex app, Flex Builder 3.0 delivers a streamlined experience for RIA development and Flex project code management.

Flex Builder provides easy graphical tools for laying out rich Web GUIs, generating the underlying MXML code. It shines for creating real-time dashboards, thanks to graphing and charting widgets. Plus, you'll find plenty of community demos at Adobe Developer Connection to help jump-start your efforts.

[ Read James Borck's review of Adobe AIR 1.0. See our special report on rich Web development tools, including reviews of Microsoft Silverlight, Curl, WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio, JackBe Presto, Nexaweb Enterprise, Backbase, Bindows, Tibco General Interface, and more open source AJAX toolkits than you can shake a div at. ]

I'm very impressed with the additions in this release. The highlights include better visual layout tools and more control over CSS, new wizards for WSDL introspection and back-end data connectivity, and plug-ins that augment workflow between developers and design teams running Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications (such as Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks). The WSDL introspection wizard makes it easy to pull together ActionScript and Web services inside Flex, while the CS3 plug-ins provide MXML-savvy templates that allow CS3 users to create Flex controls with familiar tools, versus learning to design directly in Flex.

In the Professional edition, which is the version I tested, additional goodies include performance and memory profiling tools – great for troubleshooting bottlenecks and memory leaks – and a plug-in for HP/Mercury QuickTest Professional that facilitates automated unit testing.

In all, these new features go a long way toward getting higher-quality applications into production faster. Other improvements, such as real-time charting and advanced data grids, help give your Web apps more dimensions and additional polish.

One of the most notable additions is support for Adobe AIR 1.0. The new Web-to-desktop runtime lets developers package a host of Web technologies, ranging from HTML and CSS to AJAX and Flash, into an application that can run right on the user's desktop -- sans browser -- and look and behave like local apps, even functioning when offline.

Flex-ible construction
The Flex Builder 3.0 IDE sports the typical accoutrements, including code and graphical views, a controls palette, project hierarchy and debug views, and a properties panel. Anyone familiar with Eclipse will feel right at home. Visual Studio developers may miss such features as the ability to split code windows or to simultaneously display code and layout windows as in Dreamweaver, but these are minor issues. I easily jumped into UI creation, dragging components for layout, navigation, and data access from the pallet to the work canvas.

Flex projects can be geared for the Web (Flash player) or the desktop (running on AIR). Creating an AIR project revealed additional pallet components for working with native file systems (tree, list, history) and for embedding an HTML browser into the application – useful for quick import and redeployment of existing Web site assets to the desktop. Again, Builder generates all the MXML design code.

You can create custom chromes for your GUI and programmatically control view states, but the process for embedding dynamic assets, such as ActionScript-based Flash files or data-driven charts, could be much smoother.�

For example, you can easily skin a project using Flash SWF files, and import them simply as static files (perfectly understood by Flex). But using Flash in combination with ActionScript to produce a dynamic interface requires several downloads (including the Flex Component Kit for Flash and Flex Skin Design Extensions for each app of the CS3 suite), defining a Movie Clip class in Flash, and then exporting the result as a SWC file – which creates a separate Flex-native component. It's not difficult to do, exactly, just unnecessarily convoluted.�

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/24/17TC-adobe-flex-builder