Flex Article

White Paper: Developing Desktop Applications with Macromedia Flex

Capabilities of Macromedia Central

The core set of services built into the Macromedia Central client streamlines the distribution and maintenance of applications—from both IT administration and end-user workflow aspects—making it a more cost-effective approach than currently exists. Central enables the following:

• One-click application and client installation
• Automatic application updating
• Persistent desktop presence, including background processing
• Environment for managing, using, and controlling applications
• ActionScript 2.0 capabilities

Central also sports an application framework that exposes additional, high-value capabilities to developers that enhance the capabilities of these applications. Some of these are on the cutting edge of rich application functionality and have never before been available to Flash applications. These include the following:

• AIM and ICQ services for messaging and presence
• File I/O, upload, and download
• Network state awareness by the OS
• User alerts
• Local storage for application assets and application data
• Inter-application communication and an extensible dictionary of structured data types

What Use Cases Are Appropriate for Central?

Desktop applications afford end users with an experience that is much more suited to longer, more complex tasks—or when advanced capabilities are required, such as file I/O or offline availability of applications—that web clients don't provide.

Applications whose user experience and functionality benefit when deployed to the desktop include helpdesk applications, dashboards, training and presentation content, and "business process" apps (CRM, sales force applications, expense reporting).

So when is Central not appropriate? Use cases that make use of large data sets associated with complex business logic on the server side present unique challenges that Central will handle in the future. Solving these challenges requires sophisticated services on the client to assist developers with tasks common to those use cases that involve client-side manipulation of data—for example, conflict resolution when multiple users upload changes to the server simultaneously. Central 1.5 uses its own local shared object store to cache data and doesn't yet provide routines to help developers manage reconciling changes with the server.

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