The cave between desktop applications and Internet applications has always been in the world. But to date most people have a fast Internet connection and the demand of applications accessibility on every computer is growing more than ever. Imagine that you can access your files from every computer connected to the Internet. Imagine that you can run software without ever doing an installation. Imagine that can easily work with one file by more people. Imagine sharing files the easiest way. Imagine a new Internet experience.
Terms like Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 are the beginning of this new experience. User generated content like in Wikepedia and Youtube is what Web 2.0 is, Web 3.0 is thinking further, websites in 3D or even with Artificial intelligence. All this need standards, like the standards W3C is making. But as we know, the browser has to support these standards before it will be a big success.
And there you have it, the weakest point in our modern Internet, the browser. For web developers it is hard to create a website look the same in every/most browsers or the take it further: operating systems, like Windows, Mac and Linux.
Web developers have waited to long. also thought Adobe, and the best thing the have ever done, is in 2004, taking over Macromedia. Macromedia is fame about there flash-plugin. Flash is a technology to create animations for the web. Today webdevelopers take it further and also use it to create websites. Although the browser needs a plugin to show a flash applications, installed it will show the application as it is build by the developer. Flash applications aren’t impressionable by the browser nor the operating system.
Adobe has brought our Flex, it is a XML-like programming language to describe the layout and uses ActionScript to interact with the user, layout and what so ever. After compiling your Flex application, it is a Flash file and can run on every computer with the flash plugin installed (99.99% of all computers in the world). Flex is the ultimate way to describe your application layout and ActionScript isn’t a high level programming language, although it can be powerful. Flex can interact with the server, by using special server software or server-side programming languages like PHP (which can interact with for example a MySQL database). Flex can do everything you can imagine of what a desktop-programming language can do. Thanks to flash the whole looks good, you can easily create a windows-look to give the users a nice and known experience.
Although the Flex Builder (a WYSIWYG-editor for Flex) cost a lot of money, the developers guide is free to use and with the free compiler, there ain’t a reason to don’t take a look at it.
Thanks to Adobe Flex every thing is possible and desktop-like web applications are more near to you than you will think.
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