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March 8, 2006
Some personal thoughts on the Flex/AJAX Bridge...
Before moving to the Flex project, I ran engineering for the HTML tools division at Macromedia. Back then, we thought a lot about advanced DHTML techniques, including the technique of using XMLHTTPRequest to update portions of a page locally, which has since come to be called AJAX.
As you can see from my posts, I eventually ended up moving to Flex. AJAX is wonderful and has its share of strengths, but I find working with Flex to be more fun for me personally. Flex is a great way to put together richer and more complex front ends. It has a runtime that is consistent across browsers, and an object model that is designed from the ground up to support networked application UIs.
I'm still a big fan of AJAX. I believed in it way back when, and I believe in it now. But Flex can do a lot that would be difficult in AJAX, both visually and in terms of data connectivity.
I'm quite curious to see how people use the two together. I'm convinced that some of the raw building blocks inside of Flash/Flex (e.g., binary sockets) have a lot to add to the AJAX puzzle.
P.S. In my last post, I mistakenly called this the Flex/ActionScript Bridge, which is obviously much less interesting. :-) Thanks to Robert Penner for pointning this out to me.
Posted by sho at March 8, 2006 1:05 PM