I’ve gone silent on all my social networks in the couple weeks or so because I’ve been looking for alternatives to Flex. My department are stuck in quicksand right now on the UI front. Each time we make a move, we sink deeper.

The reasons

1. KISS

Yup. Keep it simple people. I know how to do it in the pure Java world, but I didn’t have the know how to hold back the code architects on the Flex side of the team. Result: You spend more time coding the framework than writting actual code.

Another thing: On the UI, keep it optimized. Don’t create the ginormous value objects when all you need are 2 values. Hold multiple value objects.

Obviously, this is a problem with any technology, but unfortunately, we can’t afford to start over (see #3)

2. Flex just doesn’t offer anyting compeling for buisness applications

There. I said it. I haven’t seen anything that’s made me say WOW up to now. We’re building buisness applications that need to be fast and where we need to make a lot of small changes, with a lot of remote calls. GWT remoting kicks Flexes butt up to now. We’re seeing orders of magnitude better user experience and speed with comparable UI setups.

3. The people

Here in Montreal, we just can’t find anyone. We tried to replace our main developper for 2 months and found nothing. Compare that to GWT where you have access to a huge pool of Java developpers.

That being said, we will be keeping Flex in the picture, but for much, much smaller components (charts for example). We’ll also be doing smaller Air applications.

The alternative

I spent last week doing a proof of concept of our application using GWT. In no time at all, I had something to show. The difficulties I encoutered were all related to doing UI (which I’ve never done): layouts, panels, resizing, …

We’ve opted to use the GXT widgets and have some UI experts create a skin for it (yes, we all still hate doing design :))

Short story long, we now have control over our development process. We no longer need to pleed with project managers to avoid UI work. In no time at all, we’ll have reached status quo with the Flex development which was under way, and after that, the whole dev team will be able to contribute to the project … and we can back to nice clean iteration.