The Future of Dekho & Flex

Jan 18, 2012   //   by Simon J   //   Other  //  3 Comments
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Flex has come a long way since its beginnings with v1 back in 2004.  Adobe acquired Flex from Macromedia and in 2007 the Flex 3 SDK was released as open source under the Mozilla Public License.  This enabled IDEs such as Eclipse to compile Flex code, but the roadmap and release cycle was still dictated by Adobe.

Back in November 2011, Adobe announced that they would be passing the Flex project over to the Apache Software Foundation.  Flex has already been accepted into the Apache incubator stage, and mailing lists are already booming with support from the Apache developer community.

However, this announcement, along with the swell in interest for HTML5, has caused a number of questions to be asked about the future of Flex.

Current Dekho Architecture (in a nutshell)

  • Dekho is built with a Flex based front-end that runs in the Flash Player at the client end.  (Both application and Admin console)
  • This communicates with the Java-based back end via BlazeDS (also going to Apache) that is hosted within Apache Tomcat application server.
  • Dekho uses a separate database to persist settings (e.g. bookmarks) and configuration information.
  • Finer grained access to ArcGIS Server is done via the Dekho ArcObjects Server Manager.

Our upcoming OneSearch functionality will be leveraging off the Apache Solr project.

 

Apache and Flex

We are very happy about the move to Apache.  Apache is a highly respected foundation by developers and large organisations.  A lot of mission-critical enterprise applications are already relying on Apache software (e.g. NASA).

Adobe will also be providing a team of their top Flex SDK engineers contributing to those new Apache projects as their full-time responsibility.  The committee that will plan the future road-map of Flex are currently being short-listed from a large list of volunteers.

The move to Apache will prolong the shelf life of Flex – Under Apache, we expect that Flex will gain more traction with the open developer community and its a more sustainable approach for a enterprise development framework.

Esri have committed to supporting Flex for the foreseeable future, as many of their customers have successful deployments using it.

HTML5?

At the time of writing, we believe that the HTML5/Javascript/CSS3 stack is not yet practical for building an enterprise application to the same level of complexity as Dekho.

Flex has an object orientated language, fast data services with Java (AMF is quicker than JSON) and a predictable runtime.

Flex is and will remain the leading framework for first-class enterprise applications for many more years.

We also harvest stats on what browsers our clients are running.  The majority of you are  running IE7 & IE8.  IE9 is still lagging on HTML5 support and even the current IE10 is missing some important functionality such as WebGL.  (You can test your browser for HTML5 here).  For more details on current browser ‘html5-readiness’ can be seen here.

The W3C predicts that the standard for HTML5 will not be finalised till nearer 2015.

We are not blind and we can see that HTML5 and WebGL are moving very rapidly.  We are keeping up to date with developments in this area, and also engaged with Esri to see where they are going with HTML5.  When these web standards begin to mature we will be looking at having alternate viewers for Dekho.  The future roadmap for Dekho will likely have multiple viewers revolving around the one back-end.

It’s an exciting time on the web, where browsers are evolving and implementing features that make it an even more powerful platform to develop applications on.  As a product team, it is our responsibility to ensure we choose the most appropriate tool for meeting your needs, and for the foreseeable future, we believe that Flex is the best choice.

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