Web development is going through yet another little revolution: Adobe Flex is all the rage these days. Like with Java in the late ‘90s, people are talking about it, web developers are all trying it out; some are even migrating all their work to it. It has even arrived at the level where hackers are hacking it and blogging about it, companies are announcing new products built with it and everyone is having a hard time finding developers with Flex experience. With all this going on, you might wonder what the fuss is all about… and you wouldn’t be alone.

First: for Web developers like me, Flex is the first rapid application development system exclusively for the purpose of building Web applications, designed by engineers for engineers. And it’s a pretty nice and powerful IDE (Integrated Development Environment, making development easier). Basically it does for us what Microsoft’s VisualBasic 3.0 did in the world of desktop application development. I understand that some of you may argue that Microsoft’s VisualStudio .NET (and earlier its InterDev product) was the first. However, both of Microsoft’s products rely heavily on server-side logic, while Flex produces a self-sufficient application. Self-sufficient in the same sense a pure HTML page is, if you know what I mean. Flex alone is all you need to build modern, web applications. And last, but not least - heck! There finally is a debugger for client-side web application code!

Second, Flex is unusual in a way that it attracts people from two quite different camps - former Flash designers, animators, and Actionscript coders on one side, and the general coder crowd on the other side. Both camps find something useful in making the switch to Flex, which in my view is absolutely unprecedented since designers and coders usually are at odds with one another (case in point, designers often diminish the complexity of code as “SMOP”, Simple Matter of Programming, causing grimaces among the programmers). A somewhat amusing although not totally unexpected consequence of this: The Flex crowd today is basically two kinds of people, and you need both to complete a serious project.

The first kind of person you need is a Flex developer/architect - these are folks who used to code in every imaginable programming language before switching over. They are the people who know programming patterns, understand systems architecture, application tiers, data encapsulation, server-side interaction, blah blah blah. They engineer and code your application. The second kind is Flex developer/animator - these are the Flash folks. They are those people who make your application look “Flashy” - they create cool-looking user interfaces, transition effects, animation sequences and design new UI elements and widgets.

And finally, there is Flex as it relates to the entire line of evolution of programming for the Web. Flex technology, is yet another turn in the never-ending tango between text and binary applications. Here’s what I mean: remember how this all started ? HTML – plain, human readable text. Then we wanted some more interaction on our pages - Microsoft gave us ActiveX (binary). We decided it was against the spirit of sharing on the Web, yet we still wanted that interaction, so JavaScript and DHTML (plain text) was invented. Then we needed more complex Web applications, and Sun gave us Java applets (binary again). Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web came up with Curl – a plain-text based Rich Internet Application (RIA) system. Macromedia releases Flash (do I need to say it is binary?). For a couple years now, Web 2.0 and AJAX are taking over the world - RIAs delivered in plain text form. Well, not for long. Welcome Adobe Flex. The back and forth dance between open systems and proprietary ones continues!

Since nothing stands still, Microsoft is already pushing SilverLight - plain-text (XML-like) data executed by browser plug-in, producing a rich user experience on the client side.

The battle of plain-text versus binary is far from over. Stay tuned for more and visit again because my next blog post will discuss the who, what, when, where and why of Flex. Oh, and How.