Flex in a corporate intranet type environment - what's gonna bite me later?

[andrew ennamorato]

Started looking into a comparative RIA/web client framework (cough, JavaFX, cough) but our development and deployment environment is basically a corporate intranet where Internet access isn't a given.

Is there anything in Flex that is going to be a roadblock later, given that we'll be developing/deploying on machines that may not have internet access? i.e. does Flex need to pull down anything from adobe.com to run?
Seems like AIR applications do some sort of auto-updating, so that might be a concern.

On a somewhat unrelated note, does the book clarify AIR vs Flex vs Flash? My understanding of those and how they relate is still a little foggy.

thanks!

[Paul Sturrock]

SHouldn't be Air Flash doesn't pull anything down from anywhere, unless code is included to explicitly do so in the application. With respect to Air, the Updater class can be used to get the application to update itself - this update is likely to come from somewhere on the network though.

[Robert D. Moss]

Paul is right you can run your Flex application internally without it requiring access to the outside world. I can't speak to what the book says the differences are, but I'm happy to give my 2 cents At a very high level, your Flex application is a rich client (think desktop application) delivered over the web hence RIA (rich internet application) An AIR application is a desktop application that runs in the AIR runtime environment. Flash applications are .swf's created with the Flash IDE anything from simple animations using the time line to very complicated applications all written in code. All three use ActionScript as their coding language. I think of Flex and AIR for developing applications delivered over the web and desktop and Flash for animations and visual goodness. Although that would probably offend Flash purists.