The Flex strategy first began to crystallize two years ago when Macromedia rolled out the Flash 6 player, Flash MX development tools, and ColdFusion MX server. The possibilities were exciting, and the back-end environment was comfortably based on Java and Web services. But the client-side discipline was alien to the corporate programmer.
One obstacle was the ActionScript 1.0 language, which lacked the strong typing and formal class model that a Java programmer would expect. The solution to this problem arrived last fall when Flash MX 2004 introduced Flash Player 7 and support for ActionScript 2.0. Yet the Flash IDE was still built around the concept of making a movie, not coding an application. Flex presents a development model that will make immediate sense to an enterprise developer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
The sample Flex app that appears in the story is the RSS reader that Macromedia's Christophe Coenraets wrote. I guess RSS readers are now the official benchmark for next-generation markup-driven development. Here's the same thing done in XAML. … [Jon's Radio]