An interesting new player comes to the open source world - Adobe Flex. Flex seems to be a powerful choice for building the new buzzword Rich Internet Applications. I’m still unsold on having an entire application be one giant flash movie but time will tell. It does have some powerful capabilities especially in the enterprise dashboard realm. MicroStrategy has released some new flex based functionality to allow developers to build dashboards on top of normal business intelligence reports served by MicroStrategy’s BI platform. I think Flex is a good fit in this arena as it is able to aggregate many reports into a sleek and sexy dashboard. Yet, I’m still struggling to see where this technology will make its place in the traditional web application environment. It is very good for displaying data to a user and providing drill down and aggregation, but I can’t see it replacing the standard forms based approach to transactional based web systems.
A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.
Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.