Flex

Is Flex the Future

Posted by 03/15/2006

In which the author bemoans the recent marketing of Flex for web application development.

I stumbled onto a little hype for something called Flex yesterday at the Macromedia site Here... For some reason this kind of thing bugs me. Makes my stomach turn. Why is that?

Somebody once asked me whether I thought the future of the web was html or flash applications. I said I didn't know - because I have no idea. But I hope this is not the future of web applications. God help us. That sounds terrible to me.

I think the fact that the web is mostly text is a great thing. It makes it possible to amalgamate. The mashup is not possible with Flash applications deployed on the web. I don't know - but I've never even thought of Adobe as a good company for the web. Or Macromedia for that matter. Now they are combined. And trying to take over the web with Flash animations and PDF. Don't get me wrong, Flash animations can be really cool looking and fun - I just think of them as sugar on the web - not the driving force. Pdf, on the other hand - I can't stand. It is a scourge on the web.

Why do I hate Pdf?

  1. It never displays itself the right size - so vertical scrolling is always necessary. This is unlike pretty much everything else on the web
  2. The magnification choices suck, and the 'fit to page' never works
  3. The default annoying message that checks for updates every time you open the viewer. Also, it's a slow startup. And the timeout mechanism seems to operate differently with Pdfs. Plenty of times my browser has crashed opening a 100 page pdf
  4. Code samples are often embedded as images - so you can't copy and paste. I end up having to split the screen or flip back and forth
  5. There's nothing all that open about the Pdf standard. I don't know the details - but back when I looked into methods of turning Xml into Pdf it seemed like Adobe was not encouraging anyone creating a Pdf editor. The openess of standards on the web are what makes the web go
  6. It is a jarring experience switching to a Pdf from the fluidity of web pages. The menus change. The font changes. The search is different. It ruins everything

Of course Flex is Flash - which is nothing like Pdf - and yet they seem similar. Flash is just a program deployed on the web - you might as well have a "download application here..." link. I guess I thought the lesson learned from ActiveX was to not turn the web brower into a mechanism to embed and distribute applications. Then all you have is the application. You can't do anything unforseen with it.

It is analagous to the Emacs dired mode to me. If you don't know what I'm talking about - Emacs has a mode for browsing files called the 'Dired' mode. It is just a text buffer of the contents of a directory but you can do things with it you can't do in Windows Explorer precisely because it is iust text. So you can:

  1. Do an incremental search
  2. Copy and paste the text into a file (to generate a list of files)
  3. Save one directory to one file - and another to another - and compare
You get the idea. A program can only do what the people who wrote it thought of. Text can be manipulated. To me that is way more fun.

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