Tom, thank you for your feedback. yes Javascript is great, but
Myspace, one of the most popular sites that allows widgets doesn't
allow Javascript. This restricts us to Flash or Flex. Flex being the
newer technology it made sense to try flex, especially for our plans
to have more interactive widgets in the future.

Having said the above, I will admit, that the file size issue of the
SWF is still almost a deal breaker in our company's efforts to use
Flex. However, the info on using Framework caching could have been
the saving grace that allows us to continue using Flex. Here is a
break down of what I've learned from my little widget experiement:

1.)Before using Framework caching, or any compiler flags or Release to
Export my widget SWF file had a size of: 577KB!

2.) After using compiler flags to optimize and looking at the link
report (which had no big problems), the SWF file size went down to:
361KB...not bad, but still not small enough.
(btw, the compiler flags I used are: -locale en_US -link-report
matrixLinkReport -optimize=true -debug=false -strict=true)

3.) After using framework caching the SWF file size went down to:
121KB! This was a huge win! However, the caveat is that if the user
has never visited a site that uses the Flex 3 framework, then an
additional 540KB will be downloaded for the framework.

I assume enough people have Flash player 9.0.115+, so I'm not worried
about users having the ability to support framework caching. But,
does anyone have any metrics whatsoever as to how many users might
have visited a Flex 3 site where they would have downloaded the
framework? Or, does anyone have any idea how many flex 3
sites/widgets are in existence so I can tell my superiors that there
are XXX million flex 3 sites so this gives us a very good chance that
users have the framework cached????

And finally, my application is currently built against the framework:

framework_3.1.0.2710.swz
framework_3.1.0.2710.swf

Does Adobe support any backward compatibility for their various
versions of the framework? So, in the future when
framework_3.2.xxx.swz is released...will my application be able to
leverage that?


--Deven

--- In flexcoders@yahoogroups.com, Tom Chiverton <tom.chiverton@...>
wrote:
>
> On Thursday 18 Dec 2008, Manish Jethani wrote:
> > AS3 (without Flex) isn't going to buy you much. If you call your app a
> > "widget" though, I agree Flex is too much for that. The world needs a
> > mini-Flex, a widget development language.
>
> This is called JavaScript :-)
>
> --
> Tom Chiverton
> Helping to evangelistically orchestrate market-driven front-end
granular
> infomediaries
>
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