I finished the week on a very sad note. You see, sometime on Friday I came to the realisation that Flash CFFORMs, while very very cool, were not gonna cut it for the application I was trying to build. Maybe I’m being melodramatic. But right now I’m looking at this pile of DHTML widgets on one side of my screen, and Flash MX 2004 Pro on the other, and going “hmmm”. I joked a while back that the pricing of Flex kinda makes the Flash timeline look not quite so bad. I can’t believe I’m seriously thinking about opening up Flash and having a go. Blackstone, what have you done to me?

Scott Barnes, that mighty oracle of all things Aussie and CF, claims he warned us. I must not have been listening that day. Sorry mate. This mouse wants a bloody cookie – and not just any cookie, a nice almond speculaas cookie, please.

So what exactly is the problem? I’m definitely guilty of trying to make them do too much. I’m in love with the tab navigator widget, but put six on one page and load each one up with a listing of 20 records, and it gets far too slow to load. I adore the grid for the speed and ease of user sorting, but you can’t make text wrap over more than one line, can’t colour individual rows based on the data they contain, and can’t have an edit trigger a script instead of posting directly back to the database. I’m trying to create soemthing that’s very RIA-like, which is just not what it’s designed for. It’s my own fault completely, but it still makes me sad.

My New Years Resolution was to stop pretending I was ever gonna learn Flash properly, and concentrate on what I’m good at. I’m starting to reconsider. This sucks.