Adobe Flex Builder 2 (EN) Mac, TLP Commercial 1500-14999 54021980TS User Manual

Product codes
54021980TS
Page of 20
Technical white paper
Adobe
®
 Flex
2
While few would question the benefits that Internet-based applications have brought to businesses 
and consumers alike, the actual experience of interacting with many web-based applications 
leaves much to be desired, especially when compared with the richness and usability of the best 
desktop applications. 
For consumer-oriented applications, such as e-commerce, the web’s page-based model and lack 
of client-side intelligence can make even relatively simple transactions confusing and error prone. As 
a result, online businesses are losing millions of dollars to abandoned shopping carts or costly 
customer service calls. 
For business applications, the problem is particularly acute. While the web deployment model 
has allowed IT organizations to reduce the cost of software deployment, it has also created a 
community of underserved business users that long for a return to the usability and responsiveness 
of desktop and client/server applications. As a result, businesses are losing millions of dollars per 
year due to low productivity or poor decisions. 
Fortunately, after long focusing on the technical challenges of web-enabling their application 
infrastructure, forward-looking IT professionals are now turning their attention to design patterns 
and technologies that can improve the client side of the equation. As a result, we are now seeing 
widespread deployment of rich Internet applications (RIAs), a new class of applications that 
combines the responsiveness and interactivity of desktop applications with the broad reach and 
ease of distribution of the web. 
RIAs can drive increased return on investment (ROI) by simplifying and improving the user 
interaction—enabling users to find information more easily, complete tasks quickly and 
accurately, and use rich data visualization to make better decisions. Before realizing these  
benefits, however, IT professionals must navigate through a new set of technologies as well as 
understand the architectural and developer skill requirements implied by the move toward  
RIA-style applications. 
This technical white paper discusses both the short-term and long-term requirements of RIAs 
and discusses how the Adobe Flex 2 product family helps IT organizations take advantage of 
existing skills and infrastructure to efficiently deliver a broad range of RIAs that can scale from 
simple marketing applications to mission-critical enterprise applications.