I thought this article from InfoQ was worth bringing to your attention, as it was an interesting read for me, about the misconceptions Adobe come across when talking to people about Flex. We are currently a way down the path of getting one of our clients to embrace Flex, and then get the skills to build some things. We recently did some extensive AJAX work in their application and had to make sure it degraded well, so that the same functions were available with out AJAX. If we had used Flex in this area, then there would have been no extra work to make the functions behave exactly as we needed. In order to help the adoption of Flex, we have been running some Java script detection on the application to see how many of the users actually have Flash, if so is it v9 or later, if not is it later than v6 and so can be auto updated. Why? because this app operates within the tight SOE of banking and financial institutions.
So far our results look like this (BTW this is my first using Googles Chart API): This is only run for a certain users of our system, where flex will be used. I will revisit this chart in a few weeks to see the difference, and quantify it a bit more. In the article from InfoQ they address the following:
- Users Need to Install Something New to Run Flex Applications.
- Flash Player is 100% Proprietary.
- Flash is for Designers, Video, and Annoyances.
- Flex is Not for Enterprise / Business Applications.
- Flex is Expensive.
- Flex Applications Require a Special Server.
- Flex is Hard to Learn.
- With Flex, I Will Need to Rebuild My Entire Application.
- Flex Breaks Normal Browser Functionality, Like the Back Button.
- I Can Do Everything Flex Does With Ajax.
