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What is the Big Deal With Adobe Flex?

Nathan Sego, Posted: October 12, 2009

If, like most of us, you can remember going off to make a cup of tea while you waited for your favorite web page to load.  It’s hard to believe where we’ve got to. But more unbelievable still are the next generation of website applications that are starting to come out in response to the increasing take-up of broadband.

Adobe (better known for their PDF format) have launched Flex, which promises to revolutionize the way websites are built. This is a bit of a techy article, so buckle up!

What is Adobe Flex?

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.

Flex allows us developers to build and create intuitive, interactive, visual applications for the web and desktop. Exciting applications in Flex give the end user a more satisfying experience while browsing the site and also the owner of the site hopefully more profit.

Applications built with Flex run using Adobe Flash Player and can also be built to run on the desktop using Adobe AIR. This allows Flex applications to run consistently in all the major browsers and operating systems. With 98% of internet connected computers having Flash Player 9 installed, this creates a massive audience for these applications to be run.

What are RIAs?

Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are applications built for the web that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. Users can sometimes get overwhelmed and confused when websites do not perform in the same way as the desktop applications they are so used to. RIAs allow users to use sites in this way, a more intuitive way that they are already used to.