Is Flex for me?

Question

Hello,
We have a large application that does project management,
time sheets and collaboration (calendars, web folders, etc.)
written in Spring and Hibernate and we are looking to move it to a
new UI framework. Flex looks interesting but I have a few questions
and I hope some flex gurus help me out:
1) Size
I noticed that a simple hello world swf file is about 200K.
Should I be concerned about size... since the server could be on
the internet and not necessarily on a local machine. If a person on
the internet is going to face several lag times... say when he
moves from his "View Project Tasks" screen to "My Calendar"... then
flex is not for me.
2) IDE
IDE is not cheap but worth buying for $500. But works only on
Windows... any plans for Linux? I have tried the linux hacks on the
net.. works some times... not enough for writing a serious
application.
2) Remoting.
Flex introduces a new set of issues with its web services
model. Web Services today suck. Nobody can write serious
applications using them... maybe a blog reader or some intranet
apps for fun. I have tried XFire and I couldn't get it to run with
Java generics and it had probems handling my object model (circular
references through getParent(), lazy proxies etc.). I have not
written my object model so that I can dumb it down again.. so that
it works with a web service. What's the point?
The only option being Remote Objects. Now there is a catch.
The open source alternatives have a BIG QUESTION MARK ATTACHED TO
THEM. GDS is 0.2 and looks like a couple of people are working on
it. OpenAMF has no news for the last one year and their
documentation sucks... both of them good for fun but not for real
stuff. I cannot invest time and energy in things that could crash
in the future. I have got burnt once big time... chasing
will-o-the-wisps.
I don't need the advanced features of FDS, just remoting but
FDS is no option because we sell our product and customers install
it thems elves. It would be ridiculous to make them pay for FDS
since our product sells for about 2.5k USD on average... and asking
them to install it on a one CPU machine...is taking them back to
the computer stone age.
My question comes down to whether Flex is meant for "fun" or
"small time" web applications or for some real serious ones and if
the answer is latter, then what are my alternatives? I got quite
excited reading Bruce Eckel's article and was even more excited
reading the components and getting started guide but it seems to me
that I am bound in chains.
Maybe it's not what I think it is and there is a nice path
out there. Can some one show me the light?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Regarding #1: Alot of people see "hello world" as a 200k app,
and figure twice the text would be 400k - it doesn't work that way.
No matter how large or small your application, a certain overhead
is incurred.
I would advise one SWF per application, but that would depend
on your particular situation, business rules, etc.
There is good documentation on the Adobe site, and on the
blogosphere for speeding up apps - it comes down to good coding
practices (just like in any language).
Also, you can stagger the items that are loaded, and when
they are loaded - all at once, or when needed. Because Flex is
asynchronous (unlike the traditional html web based apps we have
right now), you can load some design items and get the users
attention, while other items are loading in the background.
I don't know about dumbing down web services - depepnding on
whicha language you serve them in, they can be quite complex (I use
ColdFusion). They are public, though, and that may not be what you
want. You can look at the other manners of communication such as
HTTP headers (get, post, etc, look up REST - it's turning out to be
quite popular these days). You can call Java objects, or, if you
are a ColdFusion shop, get a direct link, if you are running
version 7.0.2+
Hope that helped some.
David