Why did we take the Adobe Flash road?

Posted by Mattias Sandström on March 1, 2009

Phew, another release of VirtualTester has been completed. For the end-users this release will bring lots of new stuff, all packaged into a Adobe Flash interface. I would like to spend a couple of minutes describing why we did this and to sort of summarize our experiences.

Back in November we decided that all new functionality required for VirtualTester 6.0 requires us to something radical with the interface presented to the users. The old interface was a simple eb-page from which it was possible to download the certificate, change your settings and create vouchers. Nothing fancy, just a way of getting the job done. The interface had been changed a couple of times, mainly trying to cram more functions in, but had never had a complete over-haul. Back then we had a couple of major things on the roadmap that needed some serious changes in the user interface; exam results with topic graphs, team functions and tracking vouchers. None of this would fit in the interface!

First we started looking into the various JavaScript frameworks that are available and even created a version using one open-source framework that seemed promising. After a quick beta we got so many problems with different browsers, performance and overall stability that we realized that we must change the approach! Some of the users during the beta were running MSIE6 and although the JavaScript framework claimed to be compatible it worked for some users but not for other. MSIE7 had some very big performance issues running the pages with JavaScript and was not an ideal platform either. As the JavaScript framework did not support Opera this was also a problem. Clearly, another solution was needed!

Adobe’s Flex technology caught our eyes in the early December and we decided to kick the tires and spend a week trying it out. Flex is the framework used to create applications in ActionScript that are running in Adobe Flash Player. As the Flash Player runs as a plug-in in the browsers, many of the compatibility issues we noticed during the beta were gone! After a couple of weeks of programming a working alternative to the JavaScript version was created.

The new features were implemented in a new beta and tested in mid-January. Additional features were implemented in February and the completed version was then created and has now been pushed through the door!

Flex have enabled us to do great stuff with the user interface! Tabbed interfaces, modal dialogue boxes, user input validation and sortable lists are just some of the features that you get practically for free. A streamlined communication and responsive interface are two other major features.

Another thing that is great in Flex is a feature called RemoteObjects and AMF (Adobe Message Format). This now allows us to work on the user interface independently of the server implementations as long as the communication between the server and Flex stays the same. Developing using the JavaScript forced us to dig into the code of the server parts most of the time as we were not able to do a clean Ajax implementation.

We hope that the Flex/Flash road will be a smooth ride for future versions. The Adobe Flash Player is currently a mature and stable platform with great cross-OS compatibility. To widen our use of Flex we are currently looking into the Adobe AIR technology that will allow us to write native applications on the different platforms - hopefully we will be able to report more on that later on...