Reasons to choose Flex over/with Flash

At work, there has been a lot of discussion over using either Flex or Flash for projects that need to be done quickly. We are a small design shop of about 20 developers and designers, with a dedicated design team of about 8 people.

Our production manager insists that Flash is the way to go because there are many ActionScript 2 users in the group, and he insists that Flex is just too complicated for our team. The Flash team has won and Flex is now looked with disdain. I find this an unfortunate misunderstanding of the technology. Given that I was never able to participate in this dialog, this is my rebuttal.

An Ajax and Flex Architecture on Grails

When working with Grails and Adobe Flex, there are three possible alternatives:

a) Pure Flex – write the application like an AIR application. Your entire site is a big Flex file ( see the ufc 93 site )

b) Pure HTML + AJAX – do not engage Flex at all. Use AJAX to power all the dynamic elements on the page ( like Google Maps)

c) HTML + AJAX + Flex – Write certain components in Flex, leave other components in either static HTML or Ajax.

In this post, I will try to show why option 3 is always the best and overcomes the shortcomings of both Flex and Ajax.

Using Groovy to decypher adolescent Internet use

I’ve been meaning to write about my experiences using the Groovy dynamic language in educational research for a while, but haven’t found time to do so due to a grueling work schedule and burnout.

This post talks about how the Groovy dynamic language is used in an educational research setting, helping us better understand the way in which Internet use plays a role in adolescent development.

The NBC Olympic site and other stupid design choices

Here are a couple of bad design decisions I’ve run into that have ruined my interaction with websites or products. They all relate in some way to Flex and Grails, so I thought I would put them up somewhere.

Blue Ember Grills Grails + Flex Site live!

Our proof-of-concept Flex / Grails / Flash integration site has gone live:

http://www.blueembergrills.com/

Resolving Grails XML references in ActionScript / Flex

Grails uses XPath in its XML converter, which requires additional processing in the Flex / ActionScript world. This post introduces a very simple solution that converts XML references into non-reference nodes.

Nine Lessons from building a Grails / Flex / Flash website

I just finished putting the finishing touches on phase one of our video and animation heavy Flash / Grails / Flex site. We spent about 2 months on this site, figuring out how to get Flex, Flash and Grails to work together nicely, and I thought I would share some of the lessons learned in this post.

Getting the Flex BrowserManager working with SWFObject

Flex 3 introduces the BrowserManager object, which allows for deep linking URLs with SWF files. However, this functionality breaks when embedding flash files with the SWFobject library. This post presents a very simple solution to get it working again.

Passing Data from Flash to Flex and back

Our recent adventures in Flex/Flash land have required us to have our Flash and Flex components to talk to each other. Here are some ways in which you can get Flash and Flex to pass data from one to the other.

In Flex, we can embed other Flex files or Flash files ( pretty much everything SWF ) with the swfloader component. This component has complete and unload hooks to ActionScript functions that enable us to execute functions. This post will talk about ways in which data can be passed back and forth between the two types of components.

This post cover 3 different ways in which Flex/Flash files can interact with one another. Enjoy!

A simple ActionScript / Flex REST client

When I started my new job a few months ago, we inherited a Cairngorm-based Flex REST client that was ugly, clunky and hard to maintain. Worst of all, due to Cairngorm’s brutal MVC model, it didn’t allow us to call the service in the context of the Flex component.

Our architect Tim re-wrote it into a single class, stripping out all the Cairngorm madness so it can be
called within a single service. More recently, I refactored the class into a singleton and removed some legacy Spring Security authentication — now handled by the Jsecurity plugin in Grails.

Combined with the Content Negotiation features of Grails, this allows us to quickly communicate with a flex application without the need to the complex binding provided by the BlazeDS platform from Adobe ( which, by the way, is available to Grails through the Flex Plugin ).