Thursday, June 12, 2008

Flex, ActionScript, MXML?

It has been over a week since James Ward and Chet Haase of Adobe gave a talk on Flex to the SDForum Java SIG, and I am still trying to get my mind around what it all means. Adobe has a bunch of technologies and products in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) area, but it is difficult to work out what they are, how they fit together and which one I should use for any particular application. Here is the story as I understand it.

Lets start with the programming language ActionScript. ActionScript is ECMAScript which is JavaScript. There are differences in implementation between ActionScript and other forms of JavaScript, however most of the difference is in the Document model, which can be called the API , but is more like the object environment in which the program executes. JavaScript programs execute in a web page defined by the Document Object Model (DOM). ActionScript started as the language of the Flash player so it is more oriented to construction an environment and this leads to some differences in the objects that it can use.

MXML is an XML based declarative language that compiles into ActionScript. Basically it is a shorthand for defining the static parts of an ActionScript environment. By the way, when I entered MXML into the Adobe site search engine, the first thing that came back was the question "Do you mean MSXML?", where MSXML is a MicroSoft technology.

Next we come to the runtime environments. The Flash player is lightweight client that executes compiled ActionScript and is most commonly deployed as a browser plug in (as opposed to, for example, a Browser which contains a JavaScript interpreter). Adobe AIR is a larger and more capable stand alone client for executing compiled ActionScript as well as HTML, Java etc. (as opposed to, for example, a Browser which is a client for interpreting HTML, JavaScript, et al).

Flex is the framework which means that it is a overarching name for the whole pile of technology. The one piece of technology called Flex is Flex Builder, the Eclipse based development environment for ActionScript and MXML. As they have done with other products, Adobe has open sourced a lot of technology surrounding Flex to bring more developers to the platform.

Overall, I am not sure which is more impressive, the melange of technology in Adobe Flex or the marketing effort that tries to make the whole melange of technology seem like one coherent whole.

1 comment:

Chet Haase said...

Richard: Sorry we seem to have confused you. I know there are a lot of different products that we talked about, and it's tricky to see how they all fit together. I ought to work up a layer-cake diagram to help get a mental model of it all.

In the meantime, I wrote up a short blog on this when I first started working on Flex, as I was sorting it out myself:
http://graphics-geek.blogspot.com/2008/02/moment-of-reflexion.html. I hope that helps.

By the way, AIR does not, at this time, run Java. Instead, it basically adds browser capabilities (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) to Flex, but this doesn't include all of the various plugins to browsers such as Java.