I have to admit that the official description of Flex always left my head spinning with buzzwords and corporate breathlessness: RIA…bundled technologies…enterprise scale…presentation tier…standards-based.

It took this short video (the Kuwamoto one), in which a Macdobe engineer builds (in about 15 minutes) a visually arresting application that searches Flickr and fades in the resulting pictures, to bring me to face to face with the astonishing truth of Flex.

After seeing this promotional video, I bet that Flex will ultimately displace HTML, whether "Flex" remains an Adobe technology, or is superceded by a rival company's technology or (optimally) an open-source format.

Why? Because it's EASY. I'm sure that it's not as easy as that engineer made it look, but I'm sure it's not much harder, either.

Here's a rough cheatsheet on Flex:

MXML (the XML markup language that produces swfs in Flex Builder)==HTML
Actionscript==Javascript + (parts of PHP and CSS)

If you focus on the differences between MXML and HTML (like, you know, MXML is worlds more powerful), you miss the point of the comparison: MXML seems as easy as HTML to learn (WYSIWYG-able mark-up) and develop (a stable set of components, a quick way to permutate swfs).

Yes, Flash Made Easy does make sense for "desktop on the web" (no page refresh, resizable windows) and enterprise-scale projects (dynamically generating different swfs, like PHP dynamically generates HTML)…but looking at this video, I sensed a more grandiose ambition.

If Flash can be made this simple, why can't Flash be made simple enough to fit into Dreamweaver, and the power of connected multimedia be made available to individuals and small companies? That seems like the logical next step.

Tags: workflow · FlexNo Comments