Excellent Adobe Flex 2.0 Presentation was a big eye opener
This past Monday, Nathan Phelps gave an excellent presentation on Adobe Flex 2.0 for the Tulsa Java Developers Group. I was totally amazed out how similiar it is and fundamentally like Silverlight (formerly code named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E). I see the pros and cons from both architectures. Once Silverlight is fully released and is truely cross-platform as it is planned, then in my opinion it will have many benefits that will surpass Flex. Flex has the power of Flash transformations and can be utilized on lower end graphic cards. Silverlight has a subset of the .NET CLR running on the client side, allowing things like asychronous webservice calls, whereas Flex's webservice calls are sychronous. When the whole goal of these new application frameworks is responsive and immersive user interfaces that seems like a major drawback.
XAML and Flex's MXML markup languages have a lot of similiarities though. Now that Flex's price entry point has been reduced through their Open Source offerings it does make it more of a competitive technology, but the .NET CLR capabilties cannot be beat.
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.