Scaling Flex for enterprise applications

Last night Phil Leggetter and I attended a session on Scaling Flex applications run by Skillsmatter. The video of the event has now been posted.

We found this interesting as we as a company have entered the world of Flex. Our product is a Flex library API, which is part of our Caplin Xaqua offering, whereas the session discussed creating a Flex GUI application. It was good to see that there are a number of powerful Flex application frameworks and that they could easily be leveraged to use our library. The talk covered frameworks, modularisation techniques and tools that have been used by Lab49 in the various Flex projects they have been involved in.
Borre Wessell of Lab49, who gave the talk, also covered their agile development process, which sounds fairly similar to ours even though they do more consultancy and we do a mix of consultancy and product work.
It was also interesting that Borre recommended using Flash Builder 4 beta as we also found that was better with its integrated unit testing and other productivity enhancements. Tool support does seem a bit lacking in some areas for Flex – whilst there is a memory profiler as part of Flash Builder 4 the performance testing seems to be very much a manual process. We prefer to have performance tests as part of our automated processes so you can catch any regressions as early as possible.

Next week I will post my followup to my previous post about streaming technologies, which will touch on the LCDS approach compared to Caplin’s methods.