Why Ria Development With Flex Application Development Techniques

By Author: chris togelson
Total Articles: 8
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The demand for better, richer and more complex rich internet applications has undergone a sea change in recent years. To meet the changing demand it has become imperative for companies involved in RIA development to use latest technology. Flex application development platform is a boon to all such companies.

When Flex was first introduced to the market it was a lot expensive and saw less success as a product. Soon the makers realized that the price of the software was hindering its success as an excellent RIA development platform and later on thus released it as an open source, where it saw immense success and is widely used even today. Currently we are using the fourth version of the software which runs on Adobe Flash Player 10.

To answer why choose Flex application development platform for rich internet application development it would be apt to say that the biggest benefit of Flex that is it can be used for creating both website based applications as well as desktop applications and this what motivates its use in developing RIA solutions. Another advantage is the ease with which the application can be deployed ...
... on user's web browser or desktop. Only one mouse click and the RIA are deployed, now that's really easy.

All these benefits of Flex are of course interesting but an important question to answer for a developer is why use Flex when other well known platforms like Ajax, and Microsoft Silverlight are available for RIA development. If we consider amount of coding and time required for the application development there of course seems to be less difference between all these but a major difference lies when we compare the reach of the runtime. Flex applications run on adobe flash player which comes preinstalled on almost all computers while for Ajax and Silverlight based applications users will first have to download them to view the application.

You might argue that Ajax technology is also preinstalled on many computers in world but the drawback is that it is not multi browser compatible or cross browser compatible as popularly said. Lack of cross browser compatibility means that the application will not work flawlessly in all browsers. The rich internet application developed using AJAX will work perfectly for the platform it is developed for example internet explorer but will not work on other browser like Firefox. This complexity of the application will make the debugging process difficult and long winded.

To facilitate coding for flex application development the Flex also has Flex framework which includes code library, code guidance and several predefined codes. They can make the flex application development much faster and easier as time spent in coding the obvious features of the application is saved. The Flex developer thus gets an opportunity to spend more time on coding the core features of the application.

Rich internet applications developed using flex application development techniques thus have a greater reach, are cross browser compatible which means more users will be able to access it flawlessly and is less expensive as the platform is open source.

iFlexweb is a US based flex application development company specializing in RIA development using the latest Flex version, SDK and frameworks.