“This is really bad situation. Flex filereference.upload creates its own session, and therefore when using SSL it fails. ”

So yes, its clear that Flex implements upload incorrectly by creating its own session, which it clearly should not do. Its not important with unencrypted traffic, and a showstopper with encrypted traffic.

Why should we each have to develop our own workarounds, as you suggest, when this is an obvious and fundamental problem?

‘No-one is suggesting that Flex doesn’t have issues’
Actually, you are wrong, several of the people posted comments like:

‘please have a look into flex coders which will help u clear a lot of your doubts (grey areas) which you think are flex design issues.’

and

‘I have to ask the question, maybe your frustration comes from a poorly designed application, or a poor execution of the application rather than a poor language/framework?’

and

‘To sum up: Why I might not want to use Flex?
- Because I don’t know how.’

Seriously, just…sigh.

There are workarounds – create your own tokens or use a certificate from a trusted authority. Or use a Javascript workaround if you prefer.

Oh, and don’t you think it makes sense that a MouseDown is not a Click? It could be the start of a drag and drop. Or maybe you’ve created a simple Flash painitng app and the MouseDown is the start of a brush stroke. This is not a limitation of the framework but a misunderstanding of how it works.

No-one is suggesting that Flex doesn’t have issues. Anyone who has used it for any length of time is well aware of them. It’s just that most of the issues raised here seem to be related to unfamiliarity with the framework rather than issues with the framework itself. For exampIe, I haven’t heard of anyone else having issues getting a stacktrace.

Both have a significant learning curve, but IMHO GWT is significantly further along the maturity curve than Flex, and Google at least trys to fix things. The comment about Adobe not fixing bugs is bang on and not one people seem to want to address (surprise, surprise). This is a significant issue, and bit me right in the rear – have you tried uploading a file in firefox via https? Well, don’t bother, it can’t be done! Adobe blames it on firefox and puts their head in the sand. Read the teeth gnashing and ridiculous claims of Adobe here:
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-201

Ultimately they threw up their hands and said it couldn’t be fixed, and, although said ‘We understand that this is a serious issue and are committed to resolving it’ suggested that either you:
1) Send the file to your server in a different way
2) Find another form of authentication

Um, ya, right, maybe I’ll just create new authentication standard and get the rest of the world to buy into it. Sigh. And to think they couldn’t be bothered to create a workaround, even calling out to javascript if required (which is already done in several places already). Oh, and just FYI – firefox will allow you to upload files via HTTPS from, oh, any other web framework in existence. So much for not worrying about cross browser issues anymore in the Flex utopia. Yes…I am bitter about this issue.

Today there are several very nice widget galleries available that have come to market recently, including http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/ so the barrier to easily creating a beautiful looking front end is gone too.

Choose whatever framework you like, but to anyone that says there aren’t issues with Flex and you are misguided or just need to learn more – why don’t you learn how to be something other than useless, cause you sure aren’t helping.

(These steps are off the top of my head, so may need some fiddling)

1) Create a .fla and add the font to the library, setup the linkage so it exports as type flash.text.Font (Name “myFont”) & compile.

2) Load the .swf into your app, once loaded use:
var myFont:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition(“myFont”) as Class;
flash.text.Font.registerFont(myFont);

3) The only gotcha with this is that when you setup your style objects you don’t refer to the loaded font as “myFont” you need to refer to it with the Font Name of the loaded font e.g. if you embedded Helvetica you would use something like this:

var title:Object = new Object();
title.fontFamily = “Helvetica”;
title.fontSize = “30px”;
title.color = “#000000″;

but you can work around that by putting the embedded font name and path to the runtime loaded .swf in a config file or something

Cheers,
Chris

trace requires no additional configuration. Simply put the trace statement in your code, run in debug mode and watch your eclipse console. Are you using the debugger at all? Because it is pretty powerful and I’ve rarely seen instances where I cant properly debug my code.

2.event handling. At first, it does not seem troublesome when you see the event handling mechanism. object.addEventListener(stringConstantEventType,

Have you looked into creating your own Custom event class? You can pass data if you need to, as an argument, to your listener. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=7323

3. multithreading.

I can agree with you here, however I believe this will change sooner rather than later. Afterall, SilverLight is multi-threaded

4. dynamically typed AS3.
I see this as a very minor issue. Does casting the objects create a performance hit, or is it that you just dont like the extra typing?

5. event dispatching. This might well go to the section above, but here I don’t mean the machanisms, but some strange implementation details. I have exactly two examples – the Event.COMPLETE is dispatched by an Image before the Image object has marked itself as completed. And this caused problems. Also, the Click event is not dispatched if MouseDown is.

Are you certain this behavior is 1. not a bug and 2. not a misunderstanding on your part about how the event flow works? http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/html/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Book_Parts&file=16_Event_handling_172_4.html

6. Starting with the file upload. Something very basic and regularly needed

Im not entirely happy with the lack of remoting support for file uploads, but i do not find it overly difficult to do without it. we simply output the status of the upload as text in our upload proxy and capture that, or XML as Darren suggested.

7. fonts cannot be loading dynamically
To a certain degree I understand why this could be limiting, but hey, at least we arent stuck with user system fonts like we have been in traditional html apps. Im not complaining

8. Hibernate support
I dont see this as the responsibility of the framework. Simply put, we can’t be taxing the Flex framework with code that the majority may never use. This is the same issue I hear in other platforms I work with, people want all these features and functionality and then when its all in there they complain about bloatware. Start an OSS project and develop the Hibernate classes

FlexCoders is an excellent resource for you to ask your questions, there are some extremely bright people there, many of them from a Java background.

Event handling isn’t something I was used to coming from Java web struts world. And I had trouble with it, error code without the message, I think it was a bug in one of the version of the framework, we do have the message now.

Your other complain are I think more specific to your usage of Flex so I won’t comment on that.

The thing I had trouble with in Flex is the lack of Advanced Books. You have everything to begin with, but nothing for real complex stuff. There are some (very good) books on ActionScript, but there is a lack of information available on the Flex part. Well that’s my point of view.

Alex: check the discussion at theserverside.com so see more of AS problems.
And the classes of Flex (mx.*) need some more time to be smooth.

I’m creating a UI client, so I need the UI events, not more – that is, those that are dispatched by the framework itself.

I have to ask the question, maybe your frustration comes from a poorly designed application, or a poor execution of the application rather than a poor language/framework?

Keep in mind, Actionscript is not an “immature” language, and MXML just compiles down to the same AS bytecode that your regular AS does. MXML is just a collection of tags that point to AS classes. Nothing fancy there.

It kind of surprises me that you didn’t extend any of the base classes you were working with (ie. Event). That’s a pretty basic practice in most programming languages.