Editable Kiosk Content

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votes

I've recently been involved in a project developing Kiosk interfaces built in Flex. These interfaces are deployed across hundreds of machines.

A major request is that the client will be able to have their design team update graphics and text when new promotions or products are developed.

The previous lead developer built the current system in a few months. The singleton pattern is abused, and loads of comments contain "workaround" or "quick fix". And the content management system is only usable by a developer. Many bugs have appeared and many more will occur when features are requested. Not sure if it's worth updating this system.

My question: Is Flex the best technology for this type of development?

Coming from a web development background, I'm seriously considering HTML and Javascript for the interface, and possibly Java or Python as the sync manager pulling new files and text from a server to be used locally. To me it seems interfaces would be much easier to develop, and possibly conform to a more maintainable format. The current interfaces aren't futuristic layouts or anything, main navigation and sub navigation appear.

Note: one posible solution would be ColdFusion 9 and AIR ORM and synchronization http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WSAFE323E5-CA8B-429e-BC1C-450DA839D705.html Make a CMS interface to the main server, then sync and map local database to AIR content. And build reusable Flex components that match the models as you need them. Not sure if I'll stick arround to impliment this but after a lot of thought I think this would be a good option.

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javascriptapache-flex

1 Answers

1
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I've seen Flex used in a variety of projects including kiosk interfaces where it has worked well. The speed of prototyping and powerful skinning and layout controls suit kiosk application development in Flex, especially in situations where a highly interactive interface is required.

It sounds as if the current implementation is tightly coupled to the content which would need to be revisited if you wanted to continue using the current code. Flex applications can be highly dynamic, reading content from remote or local files so your driving requirement of being able to update text shouldn't be an obstacle given the right design.

Alternatively if you are an experienced web developer using other technologies then re-writing the application in a language you and the rest of the team are more familiar with might be more beneficial if the current code base is broken beyond repair.