The application of Flex technology in enterprise-level development

From my personal experience, in the course of more than 10 years of software development, whether it is the development of products or implementation of the project, most of the business customers to provide services. Of course, I also engaged in over two years of Internet application development. The difference between early Internet application development and enterprise-level application development is obvious, both in terms of technology, architecture, business, and user experience. To give a simple example, such as the development of language, at the earliest 2000 years or so, we all use Perl and ASP to do the site, followed by the use of PHP, Ruby and Python dynamic language to build a rich and colorful Internet applications, of course, this is not without the flex technology. Applications built for enterprise customers tend to be more static languages, such as Java and C #. Of course, with the development of technology, the intersection between the two more and more, we will increasingly find that many large-scale Internet sites are built on the basis of Java or C #, there are some enterprise applications began to use dynamic language. This is also a clear demonstration of the integration of enterprise-class applications and the Internet.

What is an enterprise-level application?

Having said so much, you need to do a positioning for an enterprise-class application system. In fact, this concept in the industry is not very clear, there is no clear definition, what is the Enterprise class, why call the Enterprise class? Some viewpoints are divided from the scale of the system, some from the team size, some from the development cycle. My personal definition of enterprise application Systems is simpler, mainly to differentiate between Internet applications and personal software. What is the Internet application, four major portals (such as Sina, NetEase, etc.), Baidu and Taobao, a variety of SNS sites, blog systems and micro-blogging system, etc. personal software, refers to the installation of personal PC software, such as editor, drawing software, development tools. These two types of applications and software audiences are the general public, and enterprise-class application system of the audience is enterprise customers, is for the Enterprise services, enterprise-class application system users are internal and external customers and the enterprise business associated with the personnel.

2009, at the technical level can be said to be a turbulent year, the internet, like a huge and full of suction, the various IT services related technologies, applications and implementation are attracted to form a complete and huge internet ecological circle. What do we recognize in that place? As we continue to provide services to our customers through technology, platforms, products and projects, we find that enterprise applications are no longer confined to intranet, and that the internet trend of enterprise application systems is becoming more and more obvious, mainly in the following three aspects:

Intranet to Internet Transformation: Enterprise application system from LAN to Internet, enterprise applications began to require multiple browser support, internationalization support, global business interconnection. At the same time, enterprise applications no longer meet the simple form and table interface, rich Internet applications (RIA) demand came into being, enterprise customers more and more advocate user experience, RIA is our follow-up to focus on the topic of discussion.

The content transformation of enterprise application: In addition to Enterprise's core business system, such some requirements gradually surfaced: Interactive portal system, E-commerce platform, enterprise-Class 2.0 (blog, Wiki, RSS and microblogging, etc.), enterprise-level SNS (community platform) and wireless enterprise applications.

Changes in demand: In addition to functional requirements, customers are increasingly concerned about the security, performance, capacity and concurrency features, and in the foreseeable future, enterprise applications must be built on the internet rather than the local area network, possibly in the cloud, and possibly in other new technologies.

As an IT service provider at this stage, we must adapt and support such trend changes from both technical and business levels, otherwise we will become difficult.

Well, having talked so much, it's mainly about a trend change. Let's take a look at RIA technologies that can play a huge role in Internet and enterprise applications.

Ria Profile and why Flex is selected

The full name of RIA technology is rich Internet applications (Rich Internet application), RIA should first be a network application, and secondly, it also has the features and features of desktop applications. It can be understood that if your desktop programs can be run on the web (now primarily based on browsers) and retain their original features and features, then we can call them RIA applications (Rich Internet client applications).

Currently, the main technologies of RIA include Adobe's Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight and Java camp's JavaFX. Flash because of the Flex SDK support, very early from the simple animation show into the Ria field, and because of the popularity of Flash, Flex should be the three major technology systems in the market share of the largest and most widely used technology; Silverlight is Microsoft's launch of Cross-browser and Cross-platform Plug-ins , can be in Microsoft's. NET delivers the dazzling multimedia experience and has the rich interactive function The Web application, already has the very big impact to the flex; JavaFX was launched by Sun in 2007 to counter Flex and Silverlight's desktop applications, but due to its late start, The current application is not widespread, but its Java native and open source nature has a great appeal to developers in the Java community.

Based on the above three technologies, we finally selected Flex to do enterprise-level rich client application development, although Apple CEO Steve Jobs has begun to publicly express the support of Flash on Apple's mobile device, despite the HTML5 and CSS3, But in the enterprise application development such a not very radical domain, considering the flash extensive mass base, finally we chose the Flex.

In fact, in Internet applications, RIA technology has long been a dazzling brilliance and charming charm, whether it is the product display in E-commerce, or SNS site dating games, or games and education in the field of interactive design, has been to the vast number of Internet users to bring unparalleled customer experience. In the enterprise application system, enterprise customers are still satisfied with the rigid tree structure, simple table and character description? As far as our experience is concerned, starting in 2008, business customers began to ask us such things, such as complex forms, graphical content display, dynamic report drawing, graphical process configuration, streaming media video playback and document playback, all in the browser. For most of these needs, we are clumsy use of JavaScript, Extjs, jquery and ActiveX, such as front-end technology reluctantly implemented, for the requirements can not be achieved, we can only shy to tell customers that these features we do not achieve, or the browser should not have such an operation and so on, of course, this kind of words in fact also difficult to convince ourselves.

Until we decided to use the flex technology to achieve rich client operations, we found that a lot of problems in the face of flex solved. In Full-stack systems, if the AJAX and Flex technologies work together to form a front-end component system, it will greatly improve development efficiency, system performance, and improve the customer experience.

Flex is an Internet application developed by Adobe that can be exported to run based on Flash Player. Flex's standards-based language, combined with a variety of extensible user interfaces and data access components, enables developers to quickly build applications with rich data demos, strong client logic, and integrated multimedia. Flex is currently the latest version of 4, a flex application should have two languages code completion, that is ActionScript and mxml. ActionScript is an object-oriented scripting language, Mxml is a markup language, very similar to the familiar Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML). In short, mxml is used to describe the interface that ActionScript uses to handle business logic.