Wouldn't the preference be to have your OWN thick client, deployed better
(more like Flash than iTunes), and get rid of all the issues of client
discrepancies?
BINGO! Better stated than what I said.
What's so very interesting to me is that IBM chooses not to develop their
own Flex/Silverlight/JavaFX. Now this is most likely because of their love
of Java, but I feel they forgot how successful they were with their
proprietary 5250 spec/implementation. Adobe/Microsoft/Sun are following in
their footsteps 25 years later and saying it is "new". The look and feel is
most definitely new, but the infrastructure has been done so many times
before it makes you wonder why Adobe/Microsoft/Sun don't look at how
previous architectures accomplished the task with blazing speed and
efficiency by black boxing things. Also note that for these companies to be
successful they will need to find a solid place to put the median of when to
make things loosely coupled (i.e. use XML as the interface) and when to make
it more "binary" and proprietary. An example of a solution I would love to
see is GWT (Java) communicating with Flex for data entry heaving
applications. In this case the user would download Flex/Flash (similar to
installing a 5250 client) and then be able to communicate with any other
Flex/Flash applications after that because it understands the "Flex data
stream" (which doesn't exist today that I know of but would be simiarl to
the 5250 data stream - just with more bells and whistles)
I have only done a single/simple Flex application to date and from what I
can tell it holds a lot of promise, but they are also "playing with fire"
because they require you to download an entire SWF file of compiled screens
vs. rendering some sort of streamed instructions from the server and having
Flex just be a very thin client layer used solely for rendering and events
back to the server.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
