November 17, 2003

Royale is now Flex

Macromedia has updated its Royale project code name to Flex. It has also released a breeze presentation and several whitepapers on the functionality and ROI of Flex.

Flex seems to work between the flash player client and a J2EE server, websphere, weblogic, or jrun, to provide a rich user interface. With Flex, the MXML file is converted to .swf and presented to the user. The MXML file, which looks alot like a XAML, allows easy implementation of data validation, reusability, and data maintenance from a variety of providers. A full blown release is expected in the first half next year, but beta program applications are being offered.

Things that I would like to see:


  1. Which version of flash player needs to be installed in the enterprise? It would be nice if it was one of the older versions, however a new version of flash with MXML is more cost effective than a new computer with XAML

  2. Is this client side verification or server side verification?

  3. For either on a data verification change how do you prevent the user from re-entering the entire page? (I'm thinking it is user element based, like the onvalidation in vb)

The power of this in a healthcare arena would be having a webservice to be used for all data validation aspects in the UI. Otherwise with healthcare institution's best of breed approach to application implementation, I don't foresee a real benefit considering the standard is to interface the same data elements to all of the systems instead of one data store.

Posted by Elyse at November 17, 2003 6:41 AM
Comments

Hey Elyse... didn't know u were blogging!

To answer some of your questions... I'm willing to bet that the player version required will be 6.0r79, or 6++ as some call it. Now, in terms of validation, etc... most if not all validation will be client side. In fact, most requests and receipts of data will be client side, without the need to render a new UI.

I alsow wouldn't be suprised if each "page" (compiled .swf) is actually loaded into a main "app" .swf, so as to allow persistance of objects/data, etc.

BTW, there is this odd bug in the comments window for MT that appears with IE6... some of the text doesn't render until you highlight it or scroll it off window... I forget how I fixed it but it had to do with duelling background CSS attributes of the main div vs. a sub-div.

Posted by: Dave at November 17, 2003 8:48 AM

Thanks Dave!

Wasn't aware of the bug, I'll take a look this evening.

E

Posted by: Elyse at November 17, 2003 10:44 AM