Flex Pasta

Will Flex take over the world?

With the explosion of Flex leading the way in web 2.0, I often wonder, 5 years from now, will Flex dominate the RIA landscape?

What Flex has going for it: A great looking UI out of the box Adobe: A big corporate name investing money in its promotion. While free ajax frameworks are great as well, there are a lot of options out there that clutter the picture of a front runner against Flex. BlazeDS - AMF. It is proven to be the fastest web 2.0 transfer and rendering framework out. It also makes coding easy for Java developers. It is open source! Yes, Flex Builder does cost money, but for corporations wanting an enterprise RIA, this is nothing. The important thing is that the code is available for the community to improve.

Where Flex struggles:

• Marketing: Nobody knows about Flex! While this is improving, many people, developers, managers, CEOs, etc have never heard of it! If they hear about it, they would probably be using it. Adobe should run a Super Bowl commercial. Flex doesn’t apply to the general audience, but hey, GoDaddy has Danica Patrick doing Super Bowl Ads. If the general audience registers websites then their next step would be making the website. Maybe Pinky and The Brain could be the spokesmice?
• The Google Effect. It is why this blog and every other blog is NOT written in Flex. Google and other search engines can’t read them! They can’t read the text or the cool drag and drop features they might do. AJAX sites are limited web crawlers as well, but not as much as Flex.

Great Points, but I’m a little scared by this Pinky and the Brain stuff. What is it?

Pinky and the Brain is an emmy winning cartoon with the following theme:

Pinky: “Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”
The Brain: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky- try to take over the world.”

Check out the intro on youtube: