The all-new hype is Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Adobe is touting Flash FLEX functionality as the next big thing in RIA. Flex is comparable to OpenLaszlo, Ajax, XUL, JavaFX and Silverlight. It uses MXML to lay out user interfaces for browser applications. Interaction is achieved through ActionScript, the core language of Flash Player. The Flex SDK provides interface components such as buttons, list boxes, trees, data grids, text controls, and layout containers. It is however a fully fledged development environment for a programmer and thus not as easy to use as for example OpenLaszlo. In principle you do need to get into programming to do anything pratical in FLEX. So what is the great big thing?

We did something very different with our Papyrus EYE user interface. We defined a simple graphics component set that is stored in the Papyrus WebRepository as models and implemented them in a QT-based library for PC applications, with native Flash Actionscript. We plan to implement it in AJAX too eventually. Because of WebRepository GUI deployment is fully version controlled and just-in-time with any other changes. The execution of Papyrus EYE calls a series of special PQL (Papyrus Query Language) commands from the Flash Player that dynamically present GUI information into the Flash player. All GUI components are dynamically loaded at runtime and no preloading of a compiled functionality (like i.e. in OpenLaszlo) is necessary.

Papyrus EYE makes the development of completely dynamic user frontends in the browser much easier than Flex. More importantly, ISIS has extended the full application life-cycle management to the user interface!