June 2006 Archives

This is very cool. Flex is the best way to create a rich Internet application. I love the Flex Builder IDE, and the fact that Flex's MXML markup makes it really easy to create a rich UI with a lot of the interactivity that you have to work really hard to get out of AJAX, and with a responsiveness that you just cant get anywhere else.

It can seem like we have two products competing for the same sort of market, in that we have Form Designer and PDF forms, and then we have Flex Builder and RIA's. But these are really two different things, and serve different purposes.

It comes down to the difference between a "Dynamic Document" and a "Rich Internet Appplication".

With Flex, the focus is on the application. The application loads, and then maybe fetches some data, or maybe lets you create some data; but what matters is the application.

With PDF Forms, the document is the focus. You can sign the document, encrypt it, run validations on the data it contains, and so on, but it all revolves around the document.

You wouldn't build a shopping cart with Form Designer, but you wouldn't create an invoice with Flex. Each tool has its place.

There's going to be some real power around the combination of these two.

A common request in the comments on the HTTP Submit post is how to retrieve the values from PHP, so I've created a simple sample just to demonstrate that clearly.

PHP Submit Sample

This sample has a couple of text fields which, when submitted using either of the buttons on the form, echoes the text back to you by the PHP code on the server. The server code is also included in the form.