Our first and only Flex project was a speech therapy application. The customer had an application written in C++, but it didn’t work very well. We salvaged the portion of the C++ code that read and analyzed the speech data from the microphone and rewrote everything else. There were also a lot of features that we added.
Flex was a good choice for this application because the long range goal was to make the project complete web based, but the first phase was for a package that could be installed on a therapists computer. Flex was easy to learn and it easily followed the Model/View/Controller pattern. We kept the C++ microphone reader because it would of taken time to develop the code in Flex and as I recall Flex didn’t support reading from the microphone very well at the time.
The thorns for this project were customer management. We weren’t involved in customer management on the job, but I kind of doubt we would of done a better job. The customers were not technical and one customer didn’t look at anything until the very end and then requested all sorts of change. We were delivering updates at the completion of iterations and it would of really helped if feedback was earlier. The final product really enforced too much procedure that should of been enforced by the therapist.
Another thorn for the project was testing Flex was not as easy at testing RoR projects.
