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Adobe Flash Or Adobe Flex : Make Your Choice

Posted on | August 17, 2007 |

Flash CS 3As a RIA developer we often encountered this situation where weAdobe Flex need to choose in between Adobe Flash or Adobe Flex for a project. You have a large project with versatile requirements, lots of interactive elements to it and the target format is Shockwave Flash Format (SWF). Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex both are used in same paradigm with slight difference of usability. The approach to this would be to identify the nature of the project and demanded timeframe.

Your app might be jazzy rich interactive app having

Case 1:

  1. Tons of high end animations
  2. Lots of images and graphics
  3. Least user interactionLeast data dependency
  4. Least server side back and forth transmission

Case 2:

  1. 100% Pure RIA Application
  2. Containing frequent user interactivity
  3. Activities on Events
  4. Providing dynamic user driven interface.

Case -1, your choice should be Flash, as this tool has almost everything you need e.g. a stage for creating Animation platform, a timeline, Art work designing tools, masking guiding and last but not the least ActionScripting ;). Flash is meant for online presentations with a rich user experience having some interactivity. Flash can provide support for presenting video, synchronized audio, small sized games and other project specific to a designer rather than to a developer.

Case - 2 , hmm here initially we have no choice except having Flash and using too many code gizmos to achieve our desired result. I remember while working on an Aviation Project I was literally fighting with my business logic and the component architecture then provided by Macromedia/Adobe. God it was really a nightmare controlling listeners and handling heavy Component framework. But yeas now things are changed, with the emergence of ActionScript 3.0 we are not that much restricted but then I think why we use the same approach when we have a better option, yes Adobe Flex, a full fledged data driven programming platform. For a true developer driven project, the tool used should be a developer tool. i.e. Adobe Flex. The UI of Flex Builder (IDE developed upon our much loving Eclipse) is different from Flash Authoring environment, focusing on a developer driven code environment rather than being a timeline specific.

Flex is perhaps a true RAD application environment which lets you to design high end Data Driven layouts in fraction of time resulting reduction in development time and cost. Flex native support with existing UI specific technologies e.g. HTML/CSS and JavaScript support makes it more consistent user interface development platform.

Flex easily gets molded with all Server side technologies like ColdFusion, Java (emm I heard that each 1 among 10 Java developer is learning Flex) .Net PHP RubyOnRails blah blah blah

Flex Data Services allows you to create rich Dashboard Apps, Flex charting help creating mind boggling charts like http://finance.google.com

Concluding the above I can say there is no way that we say that Flex is better than Flash or vice versa, they have their own space and applications.

Category: Adobe, Flash, Flex, Flex 3

Comments

One Response to “Adobe Flash Or Adobe Flex : Make Your Choice”

  1. Adobe Flash Or Adobe Flex : Make Your Choice « FlashColony Blog
    August 19th, 2007 @ 2:47 am

    [...] Vardhan made a great article on choosing between Flash or Flex when working on a project to make an SWF file. The article is [...]

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