Question

I’m starting/learning to build Flex application with Flash Builder 4.5. The tutorial link me to http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/testdrive/articles/1_build_a_flex_app.html and I notice that you can use Flex with Java, Coldfusion or PHP. I’m wondering what are the differences between each of them and which one should I choose?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can find a very similar question with my answer here: Which is the best way to get Data in my Flex Application?.

However this question deals more with the performance aspect so I’ll elaborate. Basically you should just pick whichever language you’re most efficient with. Note that besides Java, ColdFusion and PHP, that could also be Ruby, Python, .NET and probably more, as long as it has an implementation of AMF (de)serialization.

If there’s one of these languages you know best, pick that. If not, go for ColdFusion or Java since I believe they’re the easiest to setup for communication with Flex. And for the choice between those two:

• Java is a strongly typed language and is very similar to ActionScript 3, which you’ll be using on the client side. On the BlazeDS site you’ll find a Tomcat server with BlazeDS integrated and some example applications with Flex and Java.
• ColdFusion is loosely typed and a productivity layer built on top of Java. It comes prepackaged with BlazeDS and is very easy to set up with Flex. However, compared to Tomcat it’s fairly heavy on resources, which you might want to take into consideration if you plan to run it locally.