Test Driving the Flex-Ajax Bridge
Adobe Flex first hit the scene many months ago, and even as alpha software it looked promising. Flex was originally developed to give the enterprise market the opportunity to build rich internet applications in Flash. With Flex, developers could bring the advanced data interactions and almost-zero-latency user experience offered by DHTML and Ajax to the Flash frontend. So far, Flex has been well-received. Version 2.0 is in beta now with a host of new features. Our own Rob Capili wrote a Webmonkey article called “Join the Flex Revolution” that demonstrates the powers of the new development environment.
The latest release from Adobe Labs is the Flex-Ajax Bridge. The FABridge (as it’s also known) is a JavaScript library that improves the Flash Player’s ability to handle client-server interactions in JavaScript. For any tasks that previously required ActionScript to complete, you can now use JavaScript. Of course, that’s the short explanation. There’s more to the FABridge than that, as Rob explores in his latest Webmonkey tutorial, “Absolutely FAB-ulous: Test Driving the Flex-Ajax Bridge” which we just published.
He covers all of the bases on this one, so it’s intended for the advanced JavaScript and Flash folks out there. However, if you’re simply curious about using the Flash Player with Ajax, or if you’re looking for new approaches to building rich internet applications, definitely check the article out. You can also find a breakdown of Rob’s thoughts on the advantages of the new code release on the last page of the article.
We welcome your opinions about the article, the Flex-Ajax Bridge, and the use of Flash within rich internet apps in general. Feel free to leave a comment on the blog, or write to us at webmonkey@wired.com.
Read “Absolutely FAB-ulous” at Webmonkey
