I have been working a lot these last few months, and when I wasn’t working I have been trying not to overload on development and have stopped myself from working on any new projects on the side. I have finally been able to get my head above water and start to take a look at some of the new things coming out and I feel compelled to discuss Adobe Flex.
I have never been a big fan of Flash. As a linux user, I have been irritated by Flash9 not being ported for a while and did not consider flash to be something I would ever work in or support. Then I heard some rumbling about this thing called Flex and heard rumors about another thing in development that works with it called Apollo. Apollo is scheduled to be released early this year (meaning within the next two months) and as I understand it, you build an app in Flex using HTML, JS and some flash actionscript sprinkled in, you export it through Apollo to a desktop app for Mac, Windows (and hopefully linux) and suddenly you can take your webapp and make a dockapp for windows, or a background desktop app and it all connects to your website for updates and data. This is how I understand it, and how it is presented. (see the screenshots from the demo).
Flex is picking up some momentum, there is a Flexblog with a ton of examples and nifty demo’s and a ton of blogs linked off the Adobe flex page. There is also a prerelease signup for Flex3 which has more support and such for Flash9.
One of the things which got me interested in Flex was the skinning ability (i.e see this) and that it is a simple matter to have it connect to PHP/Ruby or Python as a gateway to MySQL which is clearly where it becomes interesting. Adobe offers a “try” version of it for free on the website so you can play around with it and quickly make a nice frontend to a webapp.
Flex is apparently also compatible with Mobile devices, through Flash lite (flashlite? heh..) I have not tried this out yet as I am still playing around learning the Flex interface. If it works out perhaps this is something I could recommend to work for building apps on top of Socialight.
Anyway, from my initial impressions, Flex is something I think is worth checking out (at the very least) and the charting is well worth it for doing general all purpose charts of data (I get sick of looking at plaintext lists of numbers). Will be something I work with a lot more. Obviously, if I choose to work with Flex a lot you will see some apps appear here from time to time.