Flex Technology Test

What it's Good For:

• Eclipse based development environment is very useful:
  • It has support for drag and drop components as well as WYSIWYG editing that actually produces usable code.
  • The built-in debugger is very robust.
• Feels far more polished than OL:
  • More features / events available on most components (e.g. rounded corners, many built in effects / animations).
  • Less unexplained problems than OL (I encountered none so far, compared to many with OL).
• Very good documentation.
• Online community seems to be very large - support is pretty easy to find.
• Short learning curve if already familiar with XML based languages such as OL.

What it's Not Good For:

• To run Flex applications in a browser, the client must have Flash 9 (the latest version) installed.
• Built-in HTML rendering is nearly as limited as OL:
  • There is a component available on the net called 'IFrame' that does render HTML within a Flex app, but it has problems in Safari...
• Largest supported font size is 127pt.

The Test App:

http://www.digital-profiles.com/NORA_Flex/NORATest.html

Using the test app is fairly straightforward:

1. Select a document from the pull-down list.
2. Enter a word to search for (only single words will work).
3. Press the 'Start' button.

The app will attempt to animate the words, creating a new line each time it encounters the specified search word.

Notes:

• Every second line of the animated text uses different CSS styling, and every word has a tool tip and a rollover animation (each word is an individual object).
• After the animation has completed, the 'Zoom Out' button will become enabled - this will attempt to resize the words so that they all fit in the view.
• The last test document contains Russian text.
• On my machine, the app slows to a crawl at around 350 words (the animation gets REALLY choppy), so unless you are the patient type (sorry, no pause button yet), I recommend sticking to the small and medium sized documents for testing.

Drop me a note if you are having problems with the app...

Mike Plouffe - June 7 / 2007

Great work, Mike. The first couple of tests look great (I especially like the hover effect!). Again we discover #2 of the 2 problems with Flash: chug, chug, chug... Any of the longer experiments (mine only had 19 results) cause chugdown...err...slowdown. My first idea is that this will be a reasonable last resort when other technologies can't provide the kind of animation we require. Would you agree, Mike? Posted by bouchard@cs.ualberta.ca at Jun 07, 2007 09:59