Flex Evangelist Ted Patrick has posted 10 common myths about Flex 2.0, debunking such ideas as Flex requiring a special server to it not working well with Ajax.
Patrick visits companies to talk about Flex and encounters many common misconceptions about Flex 2.0. He lists the following ten myths as the most common:
- Flex requires a Flex Player
- Flex requires a special server
- Flex costs a small fortune
- Flex applications can only exchange data with special servers
- Flex doesn't play well with Ajax
- Flex apps can only be full screen
- Flex is hard to learn
- Few real projects are using Flex
- Flex and Flash do no work together
- Flex is slow
In regards to Flex not playing well with Ajax, Patrick says:
A Flex SWF file can talk 2 way over JavaScript. We are seeing explosive growth of AJAX leveraging features in Flash Player to optimize/improve AJAX applications. Flex can leverage the Flex AJAX Bridge to make data exchange between Flex and AJAX seamless. The 2 top investment portals ( Yahoo and Google )use Flash Player for charting and AJAX for the user interface.
John Dowdell, a long time Macromedia employee, notes that several of these issues appear to be holdovers from Flex 1.0. He comments that once he sees people understand what Flex 2.0 is, they "go for it bigtime".
