digital lyceum

As part of the grant requirements, the tools we use to build the web application must all be open source. There was a bit of a discussion about whether or not to develop the site using Flex. The first thing that Flex had going for it is that it, in fact, actively supports open source, as evidenced by Adobe’s support of the Open Source Flex Project. On that front, Flex definitely made sense. Craig raised the concern of forward compatibility. With the rate at which software–even languages–go obsolete, we need to be sure that our web app is written in something that isn’t ‘on its way out.’ Flex is built on Adobe Flash (oh, remember when that used to be Macromedia, and there was actually competition?), it’s more like an editor for Flash in much the same way that Dreamweaver is an editor for HTML. Flash has saturated web design to the point that it is supported by virtually every browser and platform. As Cyle put it, “Flash isn’t going away anytime soon.”

With those two factors (open source and forward compatibility) addressed, we took one last thing into account in supporting Flex for the DL web app: Our programmers have already used it. Cyle and John put Flex to task developing Emerson’s Median Project this past year. The benefit is two-fold; 1. That makes for a very short learning curve; and, 2. We already have a solid pile of our own written code on which to build. That will make using Flex very efficient, the final important consideration in choosing our programming platform. Flex it is!