Flex is Flash for Programmers

The first thing we talked about is the designer orientation of Flash. I freely admitted that I never really grokked Flash, while my sister the RISD BFA/Cornell MFA had no trouble at all with it. Gruber told me that I was not alone, and that the tools for Flash were intended for designers and built around paradigms that designers understand. The difficulty that many programmers have with Flash is the principal reason that Adobe developed Flex in the first place: it’s their programmer-oriented RIA tool.

You may recall that I reviewed Silverlight a couple of months ago, and said it competes with “Adobe Flash and Flex, with OpenLaszlo and Curl, and with a variety of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) frameworks.” A few days later the irrepressible Tom Yager wrote a rebuttal in the Test Center Daily that said “Looked at in a vacuum, Silverlight is nice, and it demos smashingly well, but Microsoft is bringing a plug-in and unfamiliar tools to developers and content creators, while Adobe is expanding its Flash ecosystem with its own Internet run-time framework, AIR.”

I think Tom got that both right and wrong: different audiences have different expectations. Silverlight is immediately familiar to .NET developers, and the Silverlight tools are mostly the same tools that .NET developers already use.

While I never took to Flash, I’ll probably be able to learn Flex; nevertheless, FlexBuilder is a new tool for me with its own learning curve. I have downloaded the FlexBuilder 3 beta, but haven’t yet gotten far with it. Designers and what they are used to is another story entirely.

Gruber and I discussed AIR and other new parts of the Flash/Flex ecosystem. AIR can be used to deploy Flex, AJAX, and Flash applications to the desktop. The motivation for AIR is that developers who use FlexBuilder for Rich Internet Applications want to use the same tools for desktop applications.

“Thermo” is an “upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs.” Thermo applications “are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers.” In other words, Thermo is a Flex tool for designers who have outgrown Flash.

The Flex 3 SDK and engine will be open source when they are released in February of 2008. FlexBuilder, however, will remain proprietary.

Gruber mentioned that Adobe was in the process of acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, the creators of a Flex-based word-processing application called Buzzword. I have been playing with Buzzword online recently, and it is getting better and better. I’m impressed: in some ways it’s already better than Zoho Writer, although it’s not far enough along to replace Microsoft Word, at least not for me.

Stay tuned: the whole RIA language and tool area is emerging rapidly. I don’t think it will be a matter of anyone “winning” so much as a matter of several players staking out separate but overlapping territories in the RIA market.