Following on from my post yesterday, I’m asking the question to the community, how big can Flex apps get. This is probably the great unknown which makes it hard (on this project) to commit to Flex. I’m not sure if I’m going to get halfway in and strike performance problems or such like (this is just conjecture!). HTML it’s easy, it doesn’t matter how big the app gets you’re always just firing down a single page to the browser - you just have to manage page load times, this (for myself, and I guess anyone getting into Flex) is a little unknown. The questions are

1) Am I crazy trying to develop 1 person ~15hrs a week, given the apps functional list below, over ~6 months
2) Whats a good example app close to this size.
3) What kind of performance impact (if any) is there in adding each new functional area

I’ve gone through the ever growing showcase and I’ve picked out the nearest one size wise Studio Cloud, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of them that get this ‘big’. Where my definition is big is a large number of different functional areas. To give you an idea of what I’m building.. (this list is about 6mths long I guess, rebuilding an existing system which has approx 2/3 of these functional areas).

Note that this is all backed by a Rails backend so all of the order calculations, report calculations will be coming from Rails, this just has to pick it up via AMF/HTTPService/WebORB. I’m a full time Rails web team lead so this is definitely cake for me to do the backend.

[Public View]
- Catalog
  - Product List
  - Product View
     - Application views
  - Cart
  - Checkout
- Orders
- Support
[Backoffice view]
- Dashboard (upcoming orders, tickets, shipments, forecasts)
- Orders
  - List orders (search/archive/filtering)
      - Manufacturing sub view
  - View orders (new/edit/view)
      - Order Sub View (audit trail, shipping status, invoices, order calculation summary)
- Customers
  - List customers (search/archive/filtering)
  - View customers (new/edit/view)
     - Customer Tracking Tickets (list/view/respond)
- Agents/Distributors
  - List
  - View
    - View Customers
    - View Orders
- Reports
  - Reports List
    - Individual report charts ~5-10
    - Individual report list based ~5-10
- Admin
  - Catalog management
     - Categories
     - Products
  - Price List Management
     - List
     - Price matrix update (products vs price category)
  - System Options

I’m sure it’s doable, I’m not sure of the workload or performance of this. I’m not overly concerned of the swf file size, what I am concerned with is, will each additional functional area have an impact on overall performance and am I nuts for attempting this as my first large Flex project. I have knocked out a couple of small little Flex projects which weren’t too bad, definitely didn’t need frameworks for them.

Any comments would be appreciated; again all of the source is going to be freely available to everyone by a Mozilla Public License, so anyone who’s thinking of going down this path and wants to contribute please feel free to leave a comment (big *hint* if there’s any Flex UI designers out there - I would absolutely love to have a clean skin like this one…http://coenraets.org/blog/2007/07/new-version-of-salesbuilder-flex-air-application/ world fame could be yours )