Capacity Planning for Adobe’s Macromedia Flex™ 1.5

Flex is a platform for creating rich interfaces for web applications. The Flex server-side application can be deployed as a standard J2EE web application and is supported on a number of popular J2EE application servers. Those familiar with the ASP/JSP model understand that in order to produce an HTML page, the server side code must first gather the necessary data from the business tier, and then embellish that data with HTML tags which determine how the data is presented. All this translates to server CPU cycles.

Flex departs from this model by providing a client technology (Macromedia Flash™ from Adobe) for the user interface, relying on the server solely for the data. The user interface is authored using a text based markup language (MXML) and compiled into a binary format (SWF). When a user requests an application via an URL, the SWF file is transferred to the client where it begins to execute. All requests for data are handled by the server and subsequently transferred to the client. This separation of processing allows the client to handle simple tasks such as field validation, data formatting, sorting, and filtering—thus freeing up valuable server CPU cycles.