computers should be less friendly

I have to admit developing in Flex makes life very easy. It is very simple to get something going quickly and link it to simple web services. The internal help inside the Flex builder is a great start when you are finding your way and the “Live Docs” web based documentation is really great at filling in more complex holes.

It’s an Adobe( formerly Macromedia product ) so creating very attractive user interfaces is so easy, especially when compared to most SAP delivered options. The best comparison I guess for Flex Builder would be WebDynpros as you can quickly throw together a UI and bind data to it. However, unlike WebDynpro the delivered Flex components are extendable and skinnable. Not only that but you can go as far to build your own Flex components and use existing open source libraries of Flex components. So your options are really limitless.

In working with the tool for a few days the ability to “have your cake and eat it too” in Flex is really nice. You have the ability to do most simple tasks via MXML, the Flex version of a UI layout language, but when you need to really affect how the component responds you can sub-class it in AS and do whatever you want to it.

If you plan on working with Flex and SAP, get Flex 3. The webservice handling in Flex 2 was not very good when used with complex types in webservices. I was losing whole outbound parameters — not good. However, after downloading Flex 3 its seems they have fixed all these problems.

Some of the documentation is still a little disorganized. I found it really hard to find examples of the Advanced Datagrid but, I am in a giving mood so here is the direct link to download Advanced DataGrid Examples, thanks to the Yahoo! Flexcoders group for handing that out. I am sure as they move forward they will better integrate their documentation.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Flex, SAP, SDN blogger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.