adobe flex developers - enpresiv

Adobe FLEX ... the most complete and powerful development solution for delivering rich Internet applications within the business and across the web.

The Adobe Flex product family is the most comprehensive solution for delivering business applications across the web and throughout your organisation.

Designed to help developers bring desktop quality software to the internet, Flex is used by a multitude of leading organisations to deliver interactive data dashboards, customer and employee self-service applications, online product selectors and configurators and business-to-business applications.

The best advocates of our Flex work are our clients. So what are they saying?

Through the use of FLEX the Enpresiv team have demonstrated a willingness to be on the cutting edge of rich internet application development. This has enabled us to work together to produce a solution we believe will provide our club with a significant competitive advantage.

Mark Upton Adelaide Football Club Performance Analyst

Want the technical stuff?

Here's some detailed information on Adobe Flex and Rich Internet Applications ...

The need for great Rich Internet Applications.

The benefits that organisations and their customers gain from web applications needs little explanation in todays world.

But the big problem is that the actual user experience of interacting with most web-based applications is often second rate. This is particularly the case when web apps are compared to the richness and usability of the best traditional desktop applications.

For business applications, these problems are equally acute and as a result, some businesses are foregoing substantial profit due either to low productivity or to poor decisions based on inadequate data.

Addressing the Solution -
the Emergence of Rich Internet Applications.

We are now seeing the widespread deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that combine the responsiveness and interactivity of desktop applications with the broad reach and ease of distribution over the INternet. All of this is significantly reducing the cost of software development and licensing. This is the world we love.

By definition, RIAs combine the best practice in user interaction design (e.g. removal of page refreshes; dynamic, expanding information in context; and using interactivity to guide or train users - with the sophisticated use of web technologies such as Adobe Flash, HTML and JavaScript to deliver a better user experience).

Don't think that RIAs are just 'eye candy' though.

Rich Internet Applications provide highly measurable value to the enterprise that will deliver substantial business results. This is why the adoption of RIA technology is accelerating. Gartner, for example, believe that by 2010 over 60 percent of new IT projects will include RIA technology.

To be successful within today's enterprise IT organisation, sound RIA technology must:

• Leverage existing architecture
• Support standard protocols and application programming interfaces
• Integrate with exiting processes
• Provide a rich user experience

... which is why we love Adobe Flex!

Adobe Flex gives the ideal capability to rapidly deliver solutions that dramatically improve user productivity, while integrating with existing applications and websites.

Flex also provides a highly productive development platform that easily integrates with existing processes and is based on standards and best practices that have emerged over the last 10 years of Internet development.

Principal FLEX Applications

While countless types of applications can be enhanced through RIA technology, Flex is particularly well suited to those with a distinct set of characteristics, including those that:

• Automate a multistep process, particularly where the steps are nonlinear or recursive.
• Combine graphical or multimedia content with the data and application logic, particularly where users must interact with the data or media locally.
• Require server push or access to real time streaming data, such as operational data or stock quote information.
• Can benefit from complex client-side validation, such as logic that depends on previous user entries or sophisticated validation logic.
• Involve large data sets, particularly where client-side data manipulation is important.

While many applications embody some or all of these characteristics, they are most apparent in:

• Interactive data visualisation.
  Interactive dashboards are designed to enable users to quickly assess a situation through data visualisation, thus facilitating far better decision making and more rapid responses to business change. The extensible charting components, available with Flex, allow developers to assemble everything from conventional pie and bar charts to highly customised data visualisation solutions.
  Moreover, users can quickly customise the chart, or alter the data set to investigate a trend, or drill down to a particular field.
• Product configuration & selection.
  As the number and complexity of products being sold online increases, customers need additional tools to help them quickly locate the product or service they want.
  Flex based applications can hep users sort through hundreds or even thousands of available products by enabling client-side data filtering and by providing immediate visual feedback based.
• Process integration.
  As businesses expose more of their core business processes through services, there are more opportunities to deliver composite applications that present information or tasks in a role-specific or task-specific user interface. Flex is particularly suited to these process integration applications.
  A RIA created using Flex can combine data from multiple beck-end systems into a single, integrated user interface that automates employee "onboarding" or helps customer service representatives navigate through information stored in disparate customer databases.

What About FLEX & Other technologies?

Flex & Ajax

Ajax is an acronym for 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML'. A term that was coined to describe the use of browser technologies to deliver RIAs.

Flex and Ajax both promote an architecture that enables applications to take greater advantage of the client runtime to provide richer applications functionality.

While it is possible to develop rich clients using only client-sided JavaScript and HTML, Flash Player provides additional capabilities that would otherwise be unavailable, including a high performance, just in time, compiled execution engine, integrated APIs for graphics manipulation and vector drawing, and the robust, real-time messaging and integration services provided by Flex Data Services.

Flex & Microsoft .NET platform

Flex applications can deliver a rich user interface for back-end systems implemented on the .NET platform. Since application clients built in Flex are server agnostic, they can communicate with web services or HTTP services built with ASPNET or C# just as easily as they can with systems implemented in Java, ColdFusion or other technologies.

Additionally, while Flex Data Services is implemented in Java, it can be deployed with a .NET environment.