Well so much for Flex! I've now spent three or four days looking at it, reading about it, finding my way around the publicly available resources, and I don't like it.
I've had a simple form ready for hooking up for the last three days, and for the last three days it's had the same two problems: controls that were perfectly well aligned before I put them in an accordion or in a tab set become badly aligned when I put them in one, and Flex's HTTPService (their version of an XMLHttpRequest) seems unable to provide credentials to a url protected by basic authentication, even though it has a setCredentials(userid, password) function that looks as though it is supposed to do just that (but rumour has it that it only works when talking to Adobe's own LiveCycle data services).
So that's just not good enough. I can only conclude that people using Flex, who presumably care about things like form layout if they are using a tool that maxes teh pretty, are willing to spend inordinate amounts of time aligning child controls by hand in code (or by setting the parent's layout to Absolute and then moving the children around in the IDE, which amounts to the same thing), and that their RIAs are busily communicating with unsecured web services on the server - or that they've given up trying to make secured communication work on their own, and have stumped up the money for LiveCycle.
Honestly, Java can do that sort of stuff in its sleep. If only it didn't look so bad! Oh well, I'm still not going to go the applet route (hear that, Sun?) so it's back to making the YUI tabs work with my crappy html content, by loading their content via an xmlhttprequest after the page has loaded, rather than by including their content with the page, which somehow buggers the tabbing up.
I am like you die heart Java fan but SUN is more** in every sense because they
ReplyDeletealmost ruin great technology which can do wonders. One of my friend work close to top guys in SUN and they don't care about making money. I think Scott M. was responsible for mess.
Anyways now Adobe has created Flex which works great with Java backend. I show your other thread where you had hard time getting simple thing going on so here is the link which will help you..
http://coenraets.org/testdrive/flex4j/index.htm
Thanks for the pointer, that's a nice page of stuff for me to work through.
ReplyDeleteI haven't worked through it yet, though I have read through it a couple of times. Working through the examples will have to wait until I've got a bit of time free, but one thing caught my eye and that's that the examples need to have Flex Data Services (FDS) installed on the server.
Now it may be that I've misunderstood something, and that FDS is only responsible for formatting stuff up (into XML for example) on the server side. If so, and if a flex client app can consume any data from any remote url, then all well and good. But it's looking like that's not the case, and that a flex client can only consume data from a server running FDS.
If so, then it's a bit of a non-starter, both from the licensing point of view (because I'm not willing to pay) and because if you wanted to consume well-known data services such as e.g. weather forecasts or google maps, you'd have to proxy them through a server running FDS. That would be ridiculous.
But as I say, I'm going to look at that link a bit harder as soon as I have the time, and maybe it'll be ok. Thanks for the tip!
Oops, mad_about_wow is actually me, posting under the wrong account :)
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