I decided to try my hand at writing an RIA using Ajax again. It didn’t take long before I realized stuff wasn’t working or wasn’t going to work and I changed the architecture.
Then changed it again…
…and again…
…and again…
I must be doing something wrong, right? There’s no way it should be this hard in this day and age to write a really simple Ajax-app. Why can’t I wrap my head around the design phase. I get my plan in motion, then I just realize, “Oh that’s not going to work.”
Yesterday, I downloaded the free Adobe Flex SDK to give it a shot.
I must say, it’s very impressive. I felt like I was doing real programming and not just hacks upon hacks. MXML is a bit like XUL, based on my very limited XUL experience.
XUL was another candidate but, running XUL stuff isn’t as easy. There’s no guarantee that my target user will be using Firefox. Nearly everyone has Flash. The downside to Flex is that it’s probably a good deal slower than XUL would be. But that’s ok too — I’m not going for performance here, it’s more about cutting development time.
More to come later…