Back From Flex Training @ Adobe

Friday was the last day at Adobe. The conference was great and I met a lot of people. It took a while for me to get re-oriented to my normal life, but I think I am readjusted now.

Adobe also provided two days of fast-paced Flex training. From what I have seen so far, I am really impressed with Flex.

Although I think that most web sites and even most administrative sections would still be better served with a mostly HTML interface, I think that Flex is an impressive tool for applications that benefit from a Flash interface (where a highly dynamic interface is needed, for example).

It is interesting to me that ColdFusion has long been criticized by proponents of other languages for its tag-based syntax. This format, however, has been popular and is becoming increasingly so.

For example, Flex uses an XML-based declarative language (MXML) with a scripting language (ActionScript) as well as CSS for styling. This is basically the same approach as good HTML which uses HTML (or its XML-based cousin, XHTML) with a scripting language (JavaScript) as well as CSS for styling. ColdFusion, for its part is a tag-based language that includes its own scripting counterpart (cfscript). Of course, it can output HTML or many other formats.

JSP has even added a tag-based format. XAML looks like it will be an XML-based format.

I guess ColdFusion isn't too far off-base after all.

In any event, the structure of Flex seems to be very well thought out. The class itself was very good. I don't envy the instructor his challenge. He was teaching a class of more than sixty and trying to cover five days of material in two.

Coincidentally, CrystalTech just announced that they have upgraded to ColdFusion MX 7.02, so you can now do Flex development on sites they host (though not with Flex Data Services, of course).