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I've noticed a lot of articles recently about the future of application development and there's a lot of talk about Flex in there. It could just be synchronicity - ie. because Flex is basically my new job I suddenly notice Flex everywhere - or it could just be Year of the Flex. The people at my new employer believe so.
So this isn't an original idea, but I'm learning Flex stuff and it was a fun little project. I saw that Mike Shaw of Webqem had done this webcam barcode reading demo, so I thought I'd see how hard it was. It's not as accurate as Mike's, but it's not bad for a few hours work.
Adobe Flex (formerly Macromedia) is a tool for writing "Rich Internet Applications" (or RIAs). This is a buzzword that means a normal application like interface but via the web - kind of like AJAX stuff. The difference is that Flex applications compile down to a Flash (SWF) file. The advantage of this is that the performance is much better than that of a pure Javascript/HTML app, and the Flash Player is very ubiquitous, so chances are your users will have no problem using your Flex front end. The only negative is that Flex 2 requires Flash Player 9, which doesn't quite have the penetration that Flash 7 and 8 do at this stage.
Being a Domino developer, the first thing I had to try was how hard it would be to get at Domino data using Flex. Short answer: not too hard!
Okay, so this is technically Show-n-tell Tuesday (Australian time), but I was working out some kinks.
Continue reading Domino: Accessing Domino Views from Adobe Flex applications