Applet or Flex?
03/09/08 14:47
When heading for Rich Client solutions there are plenty of directions which can be chosen. One direction could be an Applet or Java Web Start solution (difference is explained in the box below), another solution could be a Flex based approach.
Both approaches are based on solid proven Frontend Technologies: Applet technology has been around for a long time and is adopted widely in the market, Flex is not adopted that widely but grows continuously with a large community behind.
Applet and Java Web Start - the small difference:
- Applets are started via browser, Java Web Start can be launched from the desktop directly
- Applets sometimes cause headaches due to the Java environment being provided by the browser - a certain JRE might be required by your application
- Java Web Start enables developers to ship the JRE with their application
- Java Web Start applications are cached - applets will be always loaded from the scratch
In a nutshell: for "heavy users" the Java Web Start approach might be a valid one, for "light users" an applet could do so
Actually the title of this post "Applet or Flex?" is not correct as we will not start an "Applet versus Flex" comparison here, the title has been chosen to invoke your curiousity. Instead of this versus-comparison we will share our development results of the "employeeManager" application, the core of the application are several database services querying a database. These services we connected to an Adobe Flex frontend on the one hand and a CaptainCasa Applet Frontend on the other hand. We thought it might be interesting to "feel" how two different frontend approaches work with one and the same business logic, and this is exactly what we want to share here. During the next weeks we will create a detailed paper comparing the two technologies in detail, but as a first shot from hip we share the Applet and Flex application. Please refer to the image below to get a high level clue on what has been done.
Simply start playing around with the two applications - the Applet and Flex frontend look pretty similar. You can add and remove employees "by hand" or you can generate a huge number of dummy employees - this enables you to generate 10.000 employees for example and analyze the time required to load these employees.
During the next weeks this mini-app will continue to grow, and we will integrate sophisticated controls such as charting components, drag&drop etc.; then we will be as well able to create a "comparison-sheet" which gives you a detailed overview about the features for each of these frontend technologies. Source can be downloaded as usual at the end of the page, the demo links for entering the application are below...
Hint: the applet demo requires JRE 1.6, Flashplayer 9 is (or higher) is required to run the Flex demo.
Download Applet Code 
Download Flex Code 
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