flex

We recently started an internal project and this time decided to use Adobe's Flex RIA (Rich Internet Client) technology for the front-end. We last used Flex on a project about a year ago and it is great for flashy web front-ends.

While learning Abobe's Flex technology one of the issues I faced was how to handle multiple namespaces in the soap messages returned from the web services we were calling. The web services had been written using XFire and, due to the tight deadlines, the namespaces where left to the verbose XFire defaults.

One of the neat features I learned using Flex/Actionscript was e4x which stands for "ECMAScript for XML" . ECMAScript is what we commonly know as javascript. What's great about e4x is that its a javascript standard extension and that it's a really usefull and easy API.

We have been busy on a project for a client who wanted us to use flex . We knew nothing of flex so its been a bit of a learning curve.

It is becoming clear to me that application development is under-going another paradigm shift with a new standard or dominant architecture emerging.