Anthony’s Blog

Can “Usability” actually be a hobby … kinda is for me. I figured that there are some folks out there with a passion for good user experiences. Like them, when I visit a website, use software, or even enter a retail store, I get very frustrated when it is obvious the company “does not care for me”… after all, isn’t focusing on good usability and customer engagement simply caring about your customers?

NoMokin.com is designed to give the frustrated user experience evangelist a forum to rant, vent, complain and poke fun at companies that just simply “don’t quite get it”. The site is a bit of an experiment; took only 2 days to get up and running (the current joke on the site it that it is itself, not very usable… yet).

This site certified 100% NoMokin

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http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/20/AIR-RIAs-raise-Adobe-profile_1.html

She discusses how Adobe is becoming a “major player” in the platform market:”Over its 25 years, Adobe — a company known less for its dazzle than its dependability — has quietly turned itself into a multibillion-dollar software vendor on the strength of technologies that have become essential to computer users. Creative professionals would be lost without the graphic-design tools Photoshop and Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat and PDF have made it easy for everyone to share documents cross-platform.But with its acquisition of Macromedia two years ago, Adobe also took on another role — as pioneer of providing a next-generation platform for developing rich Internet applications. RIAs, as they’re called, provide more intuitive and multimedia-rich user experiences on the Web than typical client/server or desktop applications, and are now in high demand as users expect more from their multimedia Web experiences with the rise in popularity of sites like YouTube and Facebook.” 

Disclaimer: I was interviewed for this article, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt

EffectiveUI is looking for several very unique individuals. If you have the passion, humility and intellect to produce the best rich Internet applications for the worlds largest brands, email me at “jobs @ effectiveui . com” and we’ll get back to you quickly:

• Senior Flex Architect - Lead a development team from architecture through deployment. You also gotta love to roll up your sleeves and “get stuff done”! We only hire the top 2% of all RIA developers, so come prepared for a tough interview
•  Experience Architect - Help our clients define how a project gets started and executed. This multi-disciplined role requires you to help strategize with our clients on system architecture, RIA best practices, and exceptional usability. Think of this position as a technology savvy product manager. 
•  Training Manager / Community Evangelist - Define how the next generation of developers “make the grade”. This role primarily requires a deep knowledge of Flex, but will quickly grow into other technology disciplines. You will need to teach and speak in front of small to large groups of people, do a little travel, and to run our Flash & Flex User Group here in Denver.  

- Anthony

Creating great UIs for clients 

Introduction
Many developers will tell you that Flex and Ajax are apples and oranges; compliments to one another that aren’t always in direct competition. While this is certainly true, in the space of rich Internet applications (RIAs), there are still many situations where both technologies provide similar solutions to the same problems. The purpose of this article is to provide a comparison between Flex and AJAX in those situations where they are both relevant to the problem at hand. It is intended to be a living document, and I plan to update it frequently as you add your comments, so please feel free to add your opinions and suggestions!
You may also download this article as a PDF from here: http://anthonyfranco.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/flexandajax.pdf

What Is Flex?
Flex is a free, open-source platform and component library for developing applications that can be deployed on the ubiquitous Flash Player. When you think of Flash, you may think of the Player or the Flash development IDE. Flex is just another way of creating applications to be deployed on the Flash Player. Flex is specifically geared toward building robust, rich Internet applications — internet applications that behave with the same interactivity and engagement as desktop applications. There are two languages in the Flex Framework MXML and ActionScript. ActionScript is a strongly typed ECMA compliant scripting language and MXML is typically used for layout, styling and data binding.

What Is AJAX?
AJAX is an acronym for ‘Asynchronous JavaScript And XML’. It combines coding with HTML, JavaScript, and XML to allow interaction between the client and server to occur ‘asynchronously’. The ‘asynchronous’ part is important - it means that user interaction with the interface isn’t broken up by page refreshes every time the server has something to do. In essence, AJAX is a series of techniques and tricks to make traditional web pages more interactive.

Feature Comparison Matrix
Caveat: AJAX services / tools / libraries / compatibilities and components are morphing everyday. This matrix is designed to compare the most important features of the most robust AJAX frameworks with the Flex framework. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list, and is subject to some interpretation. In addition, since Flex and Flash are irrevocably bound together, many of these comparisons do not make the distinction between Flex, Flash or the Flash Player.

“AJAX is an incremental path to a better user experience [however] the AJAX path itself forks. Just because a development team has chosen to go with Ajax doesn’t mean that its tool selection effort is complete. There remains the important decision of how many and what type of Ajax frameworks to use.

Flex delivers productivity in the long run but takes more time to learn. Adobe is an attractive RIA solution because it combines powerful development tools (Flex) with a near-universal browser plug-in (Flash) that’s designed to simplify RIA deployment. Managers who have concerns about small commercial Ajax providers or support issues with open source Ajax frameworks consider Flex a safe alternative. But there is a downside: To be productive in Flex, developers have to learn two new languages and an extensive runtime framework — something that can take between one and three months to learn.“
Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Research. “AJAX or Flex, How to Select RIA Technologies”

Compatibility
Right now, there is a heated debate on which platform is more compatible than the other. Simply put, JavaScript and DHTML are supported on more desktops than the Flash Player.
Unfortunately, its not that simple. The differences in how browsers interpret AJAX code is where this discussion gets very complicated, very quickly. AJAX frameworks attempt to obscure browser differences by creating components and libraries that account for browser and operating system inconsistencies. However, these frameworks do not publish ubiquity statistics, making it hard (if not impossible) to make educated compatibility decisions on which framework(s) to choose. In addition, if you need to customize a component, create a new control, or extend a library, you now have to worry about your code being cross-browser compliant. As the sophistication of your AJAX application increases, the potential compatibility issues will increase exponentially.
Flex, on the other hand, uses a ubiquitous runtime, this means that the Flash Player uses the same virtual machine to run your code on every browser, therefore mitigating potential compatibility issues. You should never have to rely on browser hacks or exception coding based on operating systems. In addition, Adobe publishes their Flash Player compatibility statistics and updates those statistics four times a year. Decision makers tend to trust technology that is constantly measured on important metrics, but these statistics are often used against Adobe to point out that the runtime is not as compatible as JavaScript. However, remember that JavaScript runs differently on each browser and that your code may not be as compatible.
Developing and testing large applications across browsers and operating systems dramatically increases production costs. This is the primary reason why many firms use AJAX to make incremental improvements and modifications to their online applications, and use Flex for large scale deployments where performance, scalability and user experience are the highest priorities.

Performance
The most definitive performance comparison between the 2 platforms was done by James Ward in April, 2007:

“While these results may be eye-opening to some, once you understand some fundamental differences between Flex and Ajax, they end up making a lot of sense. Flex applications run within the Mozilla Tamarin VM inside Flash 9. Tamarin does JIT compilation which makes code execution 10 to 1000 times faster than interpreted JavaScript in the browser. Also Tamarin can be very efficient when dealing with typed objects.

In addition, Flex supports a compact binary object serialization protocol, called AMF3, which is extremely fast. There are numerous Open Source implementations using various back-end technologies for AMF3, as well as a commercial / supported Adobe product, called Flex Data Services. If you control both sides of the wire in your application, than there is rarely a good reason to serialize and de-serialize text. Objects are blazing fast as you can tell by this benchmark. AMF3 is also typically much more efficient across the wire (even without compression) and consumes much less client side memory. JIT compilation and binary object serialization are the primary reasons why Flex AMF3 is so fast, even in the test with the full 20,000 rows. And, it’s not just faster for loading — it also speeds client side sorting and filtering.”
James Ward “Ajax and Flex Data Loading Benchmarks”

Interoperability
In some cases, the answer is not “either Flex or AJAX”, but “both Flex and AJAX”. Each have their place and can also work together quite smoothly as the needs of the application dictate. For example, you can leverage the rich animation, vector drawing and layout management of Flex, and incorporate an AJAX layer to allow your application to render complex HTML. More interesting applications can make use of Flex/Flash and AJAX to support each other. Using simple API calls to and from the Flash player to JavaScript allows simple interaction between the two and Adobe’s Flex/Ajax bridge (http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Framework:FABridge) makes more complex interaction possible with a minimum of effort. Some great applications already use this type of approach today. For example:

Earth Measurements (http://www.earthmeasurements.com) is a great example of an augmentation of an already great rich application. Flex overlays work with the underlying Google maps layer to let you measure distance between points on a Google map. A great example of complex, tight, integration between the two technologies.

Google Finance (http://finance.google.com) is a great application for checking out how a certain company is doing financially. For instance, have a look at Microsoft at http://finance.google.com/finance?q=MSFT. Notice how elegant and simple this stock’s performance graph is. It’s easy to see the stock’s value at different levels of detail with zooming and tool tips - all things that are easy to do in Flex/Flash, and difficult if not prohibitively difficult to do in AJAX. But Google also maps landmarks in the stock’s performance to news about the company that may shed light on why the value is taking turns up or down. The news is just text and links, no reason not to use HTML if you already have the expertise and the application makes no more technical demands. The power of Flex/Flash and AJAX interoperability shows through when you click a milestone on the graph or in the news list and the graph and news communicate to highlight a selection from the other. Also, scrolling the graph keeps the news in sync. A great example of each technology in it’s place and working together for a great application.

Practically Speaking
You’re probably saying to yourself, “Okay, all this information is great. But bottom line it for me. What technology should I use?”. The answer is that it depends (big help, right?) As with any software development process, you need to figure out which technology best solves your specific problems. It may be helpful to talk about what types of applications are suited for each:

Use AJAX:
- To make incremental usability enhancements to an existing web site.
- For building “widgets” that do not need a team larger than a couple of developers.
- When you have existing, internal JavaScript and HTML expertise.

Example uses could be navigational elements, simple calculators, and client-side validated forms.

Use Flex:
- When you need to develop applications that require a robust, scalable rich Internet application.
- Where you require sophisticated and interactive data visualization.
- When video & audio playback or web camera / microphone capture is a requirement.
- Where you require complex animation or bitmap manipulation.
- When the graphic design is core critical to your business needs.

Example uses could be product configurations, workflow/process/inventory management applications, video conferencing, playback & editing, immersive or entertaining experiences, data visualizations, and management dashboards.

Use Both:
- When SEO and an immersive experience are equally important.
- When neither meet all of your needs (for example: video playback and HTML rendering are both requirements).

Example uses could be WYSIWYG HTML editors, and user generated content portals.

Additionally, in real-wold use, Flex typically requires less coding to build the same or better functionality. The learning curve is higher, but the development times are significantly lower. As one of EffectiveUI’s senior architects, put it:
“I really believe that Flex development is faster than AJAX simply because you end up writing less code. The Flash runtime just handles a ton of [stuff] for you. I am technology agnostic (or try to be), but one thing I certainly am is lazy!!! I’m too old to be motivated by caffeine and late nights. So Flex has my vote in the productivity camp. Flex vs. C# feels to me like the same productivity boost that C# vs. C++ did a few years ago.”

More Resources
If you would like to dig deeper on this subject, the articles, blogs and papers below have helped us in creating this article:

Ted Patrick, Inside Yahoo! Interview “AJAX vs Flash”
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2006/09/ajax-vs-flash-inside-yahoo_27.php

Pete Cashmore, “Flash, AJAX and Yahoo Maps: Does the Technology Matter?”
http://mashable.com/2005/11/03/flash-ajax-and-yahoo-maps-does-the-technology-matter

James Ward, “AJAX and Flex Data Loading Benchmarks”
http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/04/30/ajax-and-flex-data-loading-benchmarks

Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Research, “Ajax Or Flex?: How To Select RIA Technology”
www.forrester.com/go?docid=40989

Ryan Stewart, “The Universal Desktop”
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=216

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX_vs_Flex

Flex.org
http://www.flex.org

Ajax.org
http://www.ajax.org

Flash Player Penetration Statistics
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

AJAX Browser Compatibility Matrix
http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2006/06/howre-we-doing-now-ajax-browsers.html

Adobe Flex Product Information
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/productinfo/overview

Mozilla Development Center
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX

Flex and AJAX Bridge
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Framework:FABridge

The Artemis Project
http://artemis.effectiveui.com

EffectiveUI’s Website
http://www.effectiveui.com

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The Web 2.0 Expo is seeing a TON of people from all over; 10,000 was the registration count. Some of the exihibtors include PayPal, Google, Adobe, and of course us at effectiveUI

One of the most exciting things was the announcement of the eBay desktop application beta release. You can find it here:

http://www.sandimasproject.com

The application was previewed at the Web 2.0 Expo’s Keynote by Kevin Lynch, and it also appeared in the Wall Street Journal (pretty good PR from Adobe and eBay!)

I’ll blog more details in the next few days about Project San Dimas, and the Web 2.0 Expo

EffectiveUI and Adobe are cosponsoring a rich Internet application event on May 3rd in Denver.

The event, titled “Unleashing the Power of Rich Internet Applications” will have an unusual “Business” spin to it. Instead of targeting developers, the event is specifically designed for managers, directors, and executives. It will not be a “roll up your sleeves and start coding” type of event, but rather a “understand how RIAs impact business” event.

The presenters include:
Ron Rogowski, Senior Analyst from Forrester
Mitch Green, Director Platform Application Strategy at Adobe
Alan Lewis, Technology Evangelist at eBay
Ryan Stewart, RIA ZDNet Writer & Blogger
Anthony Franco, me

Okay, here’s the best part… the event is FREE for those who register. More information, and registration links can be found here:

http://eventsadobe.com/ria/

Hope to see you there !!!

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Apollo Camp was held at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco today. Sean Christmann, from effectiveUI, showcased a way to connect Apollo applications to a local install of the Java Runtime. The video below shows how the effectiveUI team connected a Wii remote to an Apollo “Star Wars” game.

The practical applications for Artemis could be communicating to connected USB or BlueTooth devices, creating and storing to a local database, and offloading complex data parsing and calculations to the OS.

you can see more info on Artemis at

http://artemis.effectiveui.com/

or read more on Ryan Stewart’s Blog:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=313

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A great article appeared in InfoWorld and PC World last week discussing the eBay desktop application effectiveUI is building on the Apollo platform. Sean and I were interviewed by Elizabeth Montalbano, from IDG. She was an interesting reporter, very “matter of fact”. She conceived the story, called for interviews, interviewed, wrote the article and published it in less than a day!

Some of the things she missed in the article was Apollo’s ability to access the file system and display system notifications. The article mentions “offline” capabilities a bit, but I think it does not do it justice. The ability to allow users to disconnect from the internet and still interact with an “online” application is the feature that gets our customers most excited about the Apollo platform.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/01/HNadobeapollobeta_1.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129517-c,webservices/article.html

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Random House has launched a new book reader. The book reader is built in Flex, and creates a 50 page (or so) preview for most of their books. It also allows people to embed a preview of a favorite book in their own website. The launch of the “Insight” widget is getting a ton of great press for Random House. The application is prominently displayed on their home page:

http://www.randomhouse.com/

This was such a fun project to work on, effectiveUI’s team really knocked this one out of the park…

Widget Wars: A New Hope
At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the “Widget Wars,” Random House does.
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2007/02/widget-wars-new-hope.html

Random House Debuts Its Book Search Widget
Yesterday, HarperCollins rolled out its “Browse Inside” feature that will eventually be available for all its books and could be embedded in blogs and websites. Not to be outdone, Random House debuted its “Browse and Search” widget. I like the Random House Widget better as it is just the cover and gives you the option of choosing a large or small version. I like the layout of the Random House browsing screen but it doesn’t allow you to change the font size and the screen display looks like a scanned image and not a true text one (the fonts were smudgy). Harper Collins browser loaded faster, but had an irritating watermark of the HC copyright on almost every page. It was easy to manuever with font size
choices and a table of contents.
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2007/02/27/random-house-debuts-its-book-searc
h-widget/

Random House’s Insight Widget
So I received an e-mail from Random House about their new book search widget, called Insight: If you click on it, you should get a larger, more readable window and be able to look through the first 57 pages of The Book Thief by Markus
…
http://bookblog.net

HarperCollins has released a “Browse Inside” widget that simply opens the Browse Inside feature in a new window (example), while the Random House widget is a bit more advanced: it lets you browse the pages of the book in the widget itself, and even pop out a large window so you can actually read the book as a slideshow. Even better: they’ve provided an option to copy the widget without leaving the page you’re on, and a “buy” link to buy the book on the publisher’s site. There’s also a book search to find other Random House books. Rupert Murdoch may own HarperCollins and MySpace, but RandomHouse is outshining them when it comes to widgets.
http://mashable.com/2007/02/28/myspace-book-widgets/

Speaking of nerdy widgets, Random House and HarperCollins just came out with their own book widgets while I slept. Both widgets allow you to read and search books, but the Random House widget is the clear winner for its self-contained design. Contrast it with the clunkier HarperCollins one. For a good example, check out the widget for Random House’s Meta Math by Gregory Chaitin. My only gripe is they should make these things easier to find on their site by putting them all in one place.
http://deeplinking.net/book-widgets/

First Amazon, Google, now publishers …
“We believe Insight will be an invaluable marketing tool for our publishers,
our authors, and particularly our booksellers, as book content sampling
frequently is followed by consumer purchase,” Andrew Weber, Random House’s senior vice
…
Books Blog: A Conspiracy of Smart People - http://blogs.timesunion.com/books

RH Launches Its Own Widget
Not to be outdone by HarperCollins, which last week launched a browse-inside-the-book widget for selected titles in its digital library, Random House has unveiled its own widget, called Insight.
http://digg.com/tech_news

And Here comes Random House
Harper gets off to an early lead, bringing their ‘widget’ out first. But here comes Random House! Their slicker, more functional ‘widget’ is now out of the shoot. So the race is on! We’ve been working on a test with the Random House widget on our eloquence site. If you want to take a look at it in real life, click on the “Look Inside” link on this eloquence page.
http://issues-in-publishing.blogspot.com/2007/02/and-here-comes-random-house.html

The Book Standard
Random House Gives Insight
By Kimberly Maul
http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003551170

Book Excerpts Can Be Searched Online
NEW YORK — Random House, Inc. has made online excerpts available from books by Toni Morrison, Calvin Trillin and thousands of others as publishers continue…
http://www.newsday.com/technology/ats-ap_technology16feb27,0,1374207.story?coll=ny-technology-headlines

Publishers like Random House, HarperCollins hope move will drive sales
NEW YORK - Random House, Inc. has made online excerpts available from books by Toni Morrison, Calvin Trillin and thousands of others as publishers continue their push to sell more books through the Internet…….
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17365201/

US publishers allow book browsing on the Web
NEW YORK, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The dusty world of book publishing has taken a
step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers
browse …
http://today.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsArticle.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2007-02-27T200727Z_01_N27397690_RTRIDST_0_MEDIA-DIGITAL.XML&rpc=66

Book Excerpts Can Be Searched Online
AP 02.27.07, 1:28 PM ET. Random House, Inc. has made online excerpts available from books by Toni Morrison, Calvin Trillin and thousands of others as …
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/02/27/ap3467604.html

Random is offering the Insight program to other publishers as a service program as well, playing in what is shaping up to be a large field of vendors. Shatz says “those conversations are still in the pretty early stages.”
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/

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