Skip to content

MattHicks.com

Programming on the Edge

Menu
Menu

Flex: Love and Hate

Posted on June 21, 2007 by mhicks

Adobe Flex 2.01 is a very good framework and it is so much better than practically any other web-based UI framework in existence today, but there are so many bugs in the code and so many restrictions that are very difficult to get around I’m locked into a love and hate relationship with it.

I’m using Flex for the reference implementation of jSeamless and it is going quite well over-all, but I’m finding myself re-writing component after component because of either bugs or lack of features. The good thing about this though is that the entire Flex source code is available within the SDK, so I can see exactly what they are doing and how they are restricting me or causing bugs to occur.

My single biggest complaint about Flex is their complete lack of threading “support”. That is not to say it is single-threaded. Quite the contrary. Everything is asynchronous in Flex, but thread-safety is an unknown term to the Flex team I believe. There is no way to synchronize, lock, or maintain good concurrency in the system and many a crash has been due to this. In jSeamless I have a full system I wrote to offer some concept of synchronization and though extremely limited because of ActionScript 3 support not being there, it works pretty well.

I’m about to completely re-write the way Effects are called in the Flex implementation of jSeamless because it is causing errors to occur and also offers no way of disabling effects. I’m a Java developer and writing in ActionScript 3 is really not my idea of a good time, so every line of code increases my frustration.

On the bright side, jSeamless has far exceeded the capabilities of what Flex can do because of its “flexibility” and for that I’m extremely thankful.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • Courio: E-Mail 2.0
  • Scribe 2.0: Fastest JVM Logger in the World!
  • Logging Performance
  • Publicity in Open-Source
  • Play Framework for Scala: An Evaluation

Recent Comments

  1. Luke Hutchison on Multithreaded Unzip?
  2. Luke Hutchison on Multithreaded Unzip?
  3. Unknown on Multithreaded Unzip?
  4. D L on Multithreaded Unzip?
  5. Matt Hicks on Multithreaded Unzip?

Archives

  • March 2019
  • February 2018
  • January 2017
  • June 2016
  • July 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • September 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2011
  • December 2010
  • October 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • October 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • September 2008
  • July 2008
  • May 2008
  • March 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007

Categories

  • adobe
  • android
  • apple
  • beans
  • benchmark
  • challenge
  • chat
  • comparison
  • courio
  • eclipse
  • example
  • flex
  • framework
  • games
  • hacks
  • helios
  • html
  • hyperscala
  • ios
  • java
  • javafx
  • javascript
  • jcommon
  • jgn
  • jmc
  • jseamless
  • jug
  • kickstarter
  • learning
  • linux
  • log4j
  • logging
  • mac
  • media
  • mediacenter
  • methodology
  • mobile
  • mythtv
  • nabo
  • open-source
  • opengl
  • opinion
  • personal
  • playframework
  • pojo
  • programming
  • publicity
  • rant
  • raspberrypi
  • review
  • scala
  • scribe
  • script
  • sgine
  • social
  • sudoku
  • sun
  • swing
  • tutorial
  • Uncategorized
  • webframework
  • website
  • windows
  • xjava
© 2025 MattHicks.com | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme