A (Not So) New UI Front-End Alternative

When we're going to start a new project, we're accustomed to the standard 3-tier architecture, and although most of us will probably choose the same frameworks for our data and logic tiers, it's because these frameworks gives us everything we expect them to.

But what about our most important tier, the one that will make people buy our products - the UI tier? it looks like we don't have that kind of luxury of choosing a framework and we'll probably use ASP.Net.

And don't get me wrong - I really like ASP.Net and there are many splendid Ajax tool-kits\frameworks out-there that really are great,
But at the end of the day its basically HTML, and HTML is no fun - its too abstract, requires us to use Scripting languages which are hard to maintain and develop, not Object-Oriented, insecure, platform-dependent (each browser has its own engine) and many other cons.

So after cussing for a couple of days we'll probably use ASP.Net and be happy with it, because there is no other option...

Isn't there?


Adobe Flex Flash Developer
For most of us, Flash still sounds like a kids app for funny videos and games.
But apparently its a fully compliant Object-Oriented language!
So here are 3 facts you didn't know about flash:

1. Cross-Platform: Flash is supported for over 10 platforms amongst them are: Windows, Linux, Mac, Nokia (*), Solaris, Palm OS, BeOS and more.

2. Performance: From results of a benchmark done a few weeks ago, (See Benchmark Here) Flash is faster than Microsoft's new alternative - WPF\E, and on certain circumstances even faster than WPF!

3. IDE: Since mid 2004, Flash has a fully featured IDE based on the open-source Eclipse.

The most amazing thing about Flash is that it's absolutely server-side agnostic.
You could build a fully managed .Net back-end and connect your Flash GUI smoothly to it by WebServices or even directly call to your .Net methods.

Yep that's right using Macromedia's Remoting MX technology you can directly call your .Net methods from the flash code (Here's how)


Conclusion:
Before you start developing you next project, you should check reall good if ASP.Net is really the best way...