Image courtesy: spryngtree

I’m working on an Adobe® Flex® project these days. Therefore I had to do some study on Flex and its technology. As far as I found out, web design and application world has welcomed the Flex technology warmly and websites built using Flex are gaining popularity day by day. Therefore I thought to write this post on Flex and its impact on the web design world.

Actually Flex is not only for web applications. It can be used to develop desktop applications which are using web services. Adobe® Flex® technology is a client side technology. It communicates with the server side using web services. As this article is for the general people, I won’t talk about technology very much here. The final outcome of a web site built with Flex is a .swf file (in simple, a Flash animation). Within that, we can do everything like we do in an ordinary web application. For an example, we can add text boxes, combo boxes, buttons, lists, grids etc. Actually the latest Flex version (3) supports almost all the components available in the HTML and many new features.

A development language called “Action Script” is used to manipulate these component values and communicate with the server side. Apart from all the technology aspects, Flex supports us to add more Flash effects to the whole web application while doing complicated data manipulation. In ordinary websites, we use Flash animations for some limited purposes like advertising, buttons and we couldn’t use the whole space easily. Flex helps to overcome this. Therefore the website owners are thinking to migrate to Flex as it gives a better look and feel, And also, a good functionality.

Within few years I’m pretty sure that many of the websites in the internet will be ones built with Flex. But I still don’t have an idea about how this will affect the Google ranking and how the Google and other search engine spiders will crawl in the Flex built web sites. I hope to find about it and post a blog post on it in the future.