Sexy Flexy

Allan and Jamie have both mentioned the Flex application that we created for our client, Glasgow Film Office. It’s was our first delve into the world of Rich Internet Applications and Allan did an outstanding job getting to grips with it. It was a very interesting process for both designers and developers to get their heads around, mostly due to the amazing flexibility within the Flex framework.

But wait! What the hell is a Rich Internet thingie? Flex? You promised no jargon Steelso. Ok, ok…

Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) is a method of making complex things simple. The web was designed initially to retrieve documents so as time has run on the demands on what can be done within a basic webpage have been pushed. Complex interactions are not best suited to the web. Imagine that you needed to use Excel and you could only use it on the web. Imagine that every time that you entered a number or a calculation that the page had to refresh before you got the result of your query. Imagine doing that 10, 20, 100times. It would turn you to drink!

What RIA’s do is try to make complicated interaction with a webpage easier. Imagine, if you will that you’re booking your flight with Easyjet. Imagine now that rather than clicking from page to page that you could do it all on one page, no click to the next page, no waiting, it feels like software in your browser. That’s a RIA. Have a look at this shopping cart example.

The shopping cart example is cool, it lets you change the view of the page, choose your price bracket, drag and drop items into the checkout area. And not once does it appear to go to page to page to page.

So what?

Well the less you have to click and wait for the impact of your click to have effect the more likely that you are going to stay on the website and achieve a goal. The experience becomes better, richer.

There are a number of ways to produce RIA’s. This is the presentation layer of the RIA. We’ve decided to jump in with Flex but other RIA’s are created using other technologies. Each have their merits, each have their nippy bits. We like Flex.

The application that we created for the GFO was a locations database. It was a big old beast of an app when we originally built it, the HTML process was about 10-12 pages. However it worked but it was difficult and tricky to try and work out just what was going on when and where.

When the GFO website was being redesigned it was agreed that we wanted to make the locations open to the public but it couldn’t work the way it was now, it was just to complicated. So how did we start?

Tune in next time as I go into the challenge of shifting mindsets and explaining how things work to people who don’t know how things work.

Cheers,
Stewart

Monday, July 25th, 2005 Flash, biscuitmedia

1 Comment to Sexy Flexy

  1. Flexy is dead sexy!

    That shopping cart thingamajigger was just too dang cool. I need all sites to run that way to better serve my overly pampered, princess like, self.

    Cool site, man. It is cheeky yet educational. Totally approachable. I love it.

    MysteriousWays- Will praise for pints.

    2. MysteriousWays on July 29th, 2005

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