BelAus

I recently bought Peter Armstrong’s Flexible Rails (by Manning) and so far I have to say like the book and I am impressed with the possibilities of Flex. I am interested in Adobe Flex as the User Interface for Rich Internet Applications. Coming from a Client/Server - good old Sybase/PowerSoft PowerBuilder - background I have always been frustrated how long it takes - using java, .Net, PHP or whatever - to put together a decent, good-looking web application and then I am not even talking about how long it takes to make changes afterwards. Compared to the 4GL Client/Server technology the web application frameworks are way too complex for one developer to master. A developer will have to be an expert in back-end component development (back-end frameworks, business logic components, object-relational mapping …) as well as a master in front-end development (GUI frameworks, CSS and more recently AJAX ) to be able to do the same thing one 4GL C/S developer could do.

I am therefore following the much hyped Ruby on Rails, Django and Seaside framework developments and I also keep an special eye out for WaveMaker (which actually has some RAD PowerBuilder roots) and they all seem to head in the right direction. WaveMaker looks very promising - I need to give their latest Mac version a go - the only thing that makes me a bit reluctant is that it is based on java, and I have been on so many java projects which spiral out of control due to its complexity.

The GUI design aspect is exactly where the frameworks were still lacking - unless you are a CSS and AJAX expert - and that is why I am very interested in the combination of Rails and Flex. Flex needs the Flash 9 player (which is not - yet - supported on the iPhone) and in my view lacks a decent WYSIWYG RTE Editor with similar features like FCKeditor or TinyMCE, other than that it seems pretty promising.