Unless something has changed while I wasn't looking, Flex is a language for writing Flash-based applications and Flash is most definitely *not* a cross-platform technology. And being that Flash is controlled by Adobe and is not open source, there are no options for making Flash available on systems that do not currently support it other than begging Adobe to do the port. (Notwithstanding the option of Gnash, which is the GNU implementation of Flash, but I have no data on exactly how compatible it is with Flash.)loogie wrote:If I was to make a suggestion for a conversion of Maptools... I would have to say try to create it using Adobe's FLEX... Its a really great app, open source, works on all browsers for all OS (that support flash.. oh wait thats all of em)... and has some crazy features... Basically anything flash can do FLEX can as well.. including creating buttons and such...
Um, I wouldn't recommend Flash over HTML for those reasons. Have you see the HTML5 demos? The advantages of HTML5 over Flash are myriad, including adoption as an Internet standard -- which should be all that's needed! As a W3C recommendation and standard (still on-going of course), every browser will be targeting HTML5 in the future (including mobile devices) while a proprietary tool such as Flash is likely to die a slow, lonely death.if you look up the VTT program Scenegrinder it can do everything that does, and probably better, since its not relying on HTML5 and java, which isn't designed for graphical animation and such as much as FLEX is... also with built in options like dropshadows, blurs, bevels, etc that can be rendered on the fly... it is a very promising candidate...
There are other reasons for choosing a cross-platform development tool: installed base, longevity, robustness, support, knowledge base, and so forth. All of those reasons point towards Java, and then perhaps C# (except it's not cross-platform so doesn't really qualify in this discussion). Compiled languages can be considered as well (C++ w/ Qt or GTK+?) but puts more burden on the developers as applications must be compiled and installers created for each targeted platform. Pushing the implementation to an application platform on the client (such as Flash or HTML5) is ideal IFF client support for the toolkit is close to universal.
IMO.