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I had a hard time convincing people not to use Flex in 2007 based on my intuitive sense that it was "wrong". It imposes an event model on programming that is "a

I had a hard time convincing people not to use Flex in 2007 based on my intuitive sense that it was "wrong". It imposes an event model on programming that is "against" the way the web works, so the abstraction tends to be leaky. Someone that understands how the web works tends not to like it, while you could see web novices appreciating how it simplified the programming model for certain kinds of data linked controls. I had very similar intuitively negative feelings about ExtJS last year. It's not one of those things you can just swap out, you have to write the web application in a particular way to support it.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Joeri 15y ago
What made flex wrong from a historical perspective wasn't the programming model. The main issue was always that you were working on a platform that could get desupported by an organization outside of your control, whether it was adobe or one of the browser makers. It's microsoft that's killing flex (and silverlight) by making metro IE10 a plugin-free zone in Windows 8. ExtJS isn't in the same boat because it's all javascript, so it will keep working in future browsers. The other kind of "wrong", that it isn't web-like, mostly comes down to the fact that flex and extjs are designed to let you build desktop-like UI's in the browser. If you don't like desktop UI's inside a browser window, you won't like those tools.
gtCameron 15y ago
Completely agree about ExtJS. It is quite valuable in that once you learn it there are a lot of things you can easily throw together that would have been a lot more difficult with something else, but the learning curve is so high that its tough getting new developers to the point where they can add to the code base.