I’ve been searching for some kind of UI technology that I like for years now. I was very partial to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, especially when AJAX came along to pull it all together. But I don’t think AJAX will be long-lasting. I have also never really liked Java Swing. It is bulky and limited. In order to make something truly custom, you have to do too much manually.
During my search, I have come across the Adobe Flex technology. Flex is the combination of Flash 9 and ActionScript to programatically create UI components and render them in flash. One of the advantages of this approach is the flexibility of the vector-based Flash animation for UI components.
I have been experimenting with PHP and Flex by creating PHP data provider classes that retrieve data from the HTTP POST array that is sent by Flex. The data provider prints XML data to the screen, which is then used by Flex to load its components with data. Flex can also accept HTTP commands, but I haven’t broken into that yet.
Currently, I’m working with a very simple Flex view that displays the comment counts of the users on my family site. The Flex Charting extension provides a rich visual display for data so I can graph all the comments out in a pie chart. I’m also working on a chatroom UI that will take the place of the old HTML-driven UI for my family chatroom. PHP and MySQL can still provide the backend, but there are major restrictions of my current interface. I’m trying to create a more interactive and intuitive chatroom that is updated automatically whenever anyone adds a line of chat. My current model is only updated from the client side.
One of the things I read that pointed me toward Flex was this article Bruce Eckel (of Thinking in Java fame). On Friday, I saw the latest version of Java Developer’s Journal at OCI when I dropped off some paperwork, and the cover story was about using Flex with Java. So I guess I’m barking up the right tree.
