Flex in Enterprise applications

Due to seriousness and robustness people who developing enterprise applications are very
careful in selecting the technology platform or language for meeting their requirements.
Mostly their choice is dependent on following factors.

A) Time requires developing and integrating with existing applications.

B) Security
C) Skills set resource pool.
D) Scalability and performance
E) Cost and ROI

Lets see how Flex is good in above factors in details.

A) Time requires developing / integrating with existing applications:

Flex allows seamless integration with existing backend technologies. Such as
PHP,.Net,J2EE etc. In fact previously its difficult to have collaborative approach of fetching
data and analyzing it on client. For example if you have backend system developed in many
different technologies and you want single front-end client to develop which will fetch data
from them and shows analyses based output, then flex is proven good front-end tool to fit in
this scenario. In fact it supports server code of any flavor POJO, Hibernate/Spring, JMS,
MSMQ etc.

B) Security:
Flash player on client have built in security manager which provides all standards protection
for cross-domain and zone access. Flex also supports various encryption techniques by
using open source encryption library. As compare to other front-end technologies flex
stands first in terms of more security.

C) Skill set resource pool:

Developing skill set of Flex programming for any OOPs programmer is very easy, especially
for JSP and ASP programmer. Java, C# and ActionScript 3 are very similar. Many open
source tools are available which converts code from Java and C# to Actionscript 3 syntax.
Eclipse is a familiar environment for many developers. Tools, deployment techniques,
security, performance tuning everything can be reused. So learning time is less for any
experience programmer which gives advantage to enterprise to reuse existing resource
pool for Flex project.

D) Scalability and performance:

Flash player is high performance modern virtual machine with precompiled optimized code
and just-in-time (JIT) machine code compiler. Flash player available for browser as plug-in,
for Desktop application as Standalone player or Using Adobe Air runtime and for mobile as
Flash- lite player. If enterprise wants to reach broad customer base with high engaging
experience with in less time then Adobe Flash platform is best choice for them.

Flex performance advantages over other client technologies:

1) Prototyping application in Flex takes less time.

2) Require less amount of coding for developing client side application.
3) Customizing and developing new UI Components are easy.
4) The Highly optimized ActionScript code is only 50 time slower than C in interpreted mode
depending on native system configuration and performance.
5) No refreshing.
6i) Flex provides near real-time data rendering to the GUI and very high refresh rates on
large data sets.
7) Modularizing and support of design patterns make easy coding and project management.
8) Server data push:
Flex supports real-time server data push. It successfully uses server push to deliver real
time live video, audio and data over http or secure https protocol.
9) It Supports Actionscript Messaging Format (AMF0 to AMF3) and XML RPC, SOAP,
JSON and custom messages etc.
10) Network performance:
Flex effectively manage connection with backend using high network thru-put. It manages
network availability and firewall issues. Flex combines multiple requests over same
connection to achieve maximum performance. You also get an alternative real-time push or
pull connections on additional protocols, direct socket API and tons of low-level hooks that
allow you build any protocol you want.

There are more advantages for to say in short Flex outperforms with other client side
technologies in terms of security, performance and stability which are very important for
enterprise applications.

E) Cost and ROI:

Flex SDK is available free of Cost. Open source development tools such FlashDevelop and
Commercial like FlexBuilder gives good development environment. Flex offer robust
application integration using Adobe open source Blaze-ds, commercial Live-cycle and third
party open source Granite-ds. Flex provides so much in accessibility, localization and
customize engaging experience.

Conclusion:
Investing in Flex for re-writing products for any organization is now difficult to resist as ROI
on Flex development is high with comparing other client side technologies.