Flex 3

Akxius uses Graphical design languages like Adobe/Macromedia Flex which allows us to take you to the next level of web application development with the concept of Rich Internet Applications (aka RIAs). You may have seen applications developed natively in Flash itself and realized that it offers a much more robust experience for the user where productivity is bolstered by ease of use, streamlined workflow, and real time interactivity that is impossible to accomplish in HTML itself. However developing rich applications in Flash for those who are core developers is daunting and unintuitive. The Flash development tool is geared for designers, and developing on a timeline is a strange concept. Flex removes that barrier to entry by providing a programmatic way for developing these RIAs.

What is an RIA anyways? Well HTML applications are state-less. Application servers maintain state by using cookies and session variables to keep track of users, but all the logic is on the server. So while a user is looking at a page in their browser, the application is unable to do anything until the user commits an action that sends data from the page back to the server for processing. The code processes the data, and generates resulting HTML that the browser loads back in.

A simple example would be a report or search tool that queries a sales/CRM database based on various criteria from the user such as deal time frame, product group, and sales executive. The user enters these values, clicks on a submit button, and the browser goes blank while it waits for a response from the server and loads the resulting HTML which would be a tabular list of records that match the criteria:

In the Flex world, your application wouldn't need to post a request to the server every time the user made a change. Instead of the logic living purely on the server side, your presentation tier is all on the client. So imagine changing filters or criteria, and the table automatically updating as a result. Imagine clicking on a column title and the column automatically sorts without reloading the page. This saves hits to your web server, application server, database, and network. For one user this may not be a big deal, but what about 1000 users, or 10 000 users?

HTML based applications are a series of HTML web pages; Flex applications are LIVE applications. A simple analogy is imagine Word or Excel being an HTML web application; vs the real application itself. It could be done; but the real application is aware of your mouse movements, every key stroke, and provides much more feedback to the user by using sound, animation, and other visual queues.

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