Am I the only one who just doesn’t understand why so many ColdFusion developers are jumping to Flex? I’m aware that my opinion on Flex and its place may be unpopular in the ColdFusion community, but I’m wiling to entertain the possibility that I may be wrong, so bear with me.

I’ve taken in all the Flex coverage and sessions at CFUnited and MAX, and I’ve attended full day workshops on Flex more than once. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been nothing but impressed with the capabilities of the platform, and pleased that Adobe has made everything work so well with ColdFusion. I just don’t like the end product of most sites built in Flex. I am most impressed with sites that use nice clean markup and unobtrusive JavaScript for progressive enhancement. Whenever I visit a Flex site, it feels like I’m using someone else’s computer. You know that feeling? for me it’s the fact that usually, my MacBook Pro’s trackpad scrolling will not work with the Flex scroll-bars. Not a huge deal, but it makes a difference.

One of the big advantages of using Flex is not having to worry about testing in multiple browsers. I believe over 99% of people can access your Flex site with their existing version of Flash. This is a great benefit, but it’s not as big of a deal as it was a few years ago. Today, the biggest problems are still with IE6, and for many sites I’m happy providing decreased functionality for those users. Using jQuery also eliminates a large amount of JavaScript incompatibility between browsers.

There is a market for Flex, and I think that market will continue to grow. I’m also pleased that Adobe has embraced it, since it adds a perfect piece to their product suite. I just don’t like the whole “If you’re not jumping on the Flex bandwagon, you’re missing the boat” mentality that I hear a bit too much in the ColdFusion community. I hope that Adobe continues to support and enhance the capability of ColdFusion to work with HTML based content.