Adobe Systems is the leader in RIA technology. Macromedia (now Adobe) pioneered the .SWF file format. A .SWF file is a precompiled binary file that contains animations and applets with different interactions and functions. Data used in the application can be compiled in the .SWF file or can reside on the server. The file is fully compiled by the Adobe Flash® Player, a plug-in for the browser that renders the UI and carries the interactions.

The Flash Player can be installed in any browser, making SWF applications cross-browser compatible. The Flash Player is widely used, as it is installed on 98% of computers. It is also available for mobile devices and other non-PC systems, for example, Sony PlayStation®, Nintendo® Wii, and other custom professional devices.

Plug-ins are available to embed SWF applications in Microsoft PowerPoint® and Word, other desktop programs, and PDF documents, making them very portable. You can e-mail .SWF files, store them locally on a computer, and play them in either Flash Player or a browser.

SWF applications were first developed using the Flash Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Flash, as a development environment, was tailored for creative designers. It followed an animation-based workflow, that is, the entire application was produced like a movie and every user action was put on a time line. That workflow was extremely useful for dynamic, animated banners, and advertising applications, which helped to establish SWF as the dominant standard for interactive animations and graphics.

These animations and graphics create transitions and other effects that make the user experience more continuous and natural. Today the animation effects play a significant role in advanced visualization too.

While many people liked Flash applications, few developers appreciated the animation-based workflow. Hence the development of Adobe Flex®, an IDE that is targeted to application developers rather than designers. Flex is built on Eclipse™, an open source development platform.

Flex offers a robust set of components for developing applications, pre-packaged animation effects, and styling options for creating aesthetically pleasing UIs, as well as a rich language to implement any custom function. The popularity of Flex is further driven by the fact that Adobe made SWF and the Flex compiler open source (www.flex.org). Adobe also introduced significant enhancements to the ActionScript™ programming language and the Flash Player.

ActionScript is based on ECMAScript (JavaScript). It was originally designed to control 2D animations. ActionScript 3, the latest version of the language, is a complete restructuring of the language targeted at a new virtual machine, Flash Player 9. ActionScript 3.0 has become a lot more like Java and C+, providing a strong foundation for application development. Flash Player 9 is analogous to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and the compiler enhancements boast ten times performance gains over previous versions of the Player.

The unique combination of animation effects, vector graphics, interaction effects, and portability makes Flex an ideal tool for developing rich, aesthetically distinct, and highly interactive dashboards and visualizations. The ability to develop custom components allows developers to meet unique, non-standard Business Intelligence visualization and data representation needs.