This link has been bookmarked by 23 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Mar 2007, by Orlin Monad.
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28 Mar 07
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Not only is the ActionScript language becoming like Java – the whole damn thing is becoming like Java. Granted, Flash tends to be faster and a little bit better looking than most Java Applets, but it’s all starting to look quite heavy.
The Java Applet story never really panned out like it was hyped; and the Flex hype is starting to sound exactly the same.
Oh yeah, and the ActiveX story sounded pretty similar too.
The big corporations stagnate until there’s sufficient competition. C#’s rapid progression into new features has probably done more to propel Java forward than anything in recent years.
For Flex, the competition is AJAX. If this new wave of browser development using DHTML, Javascript, JSON, and XMLHTTPRequest didn’t come along, Flash wouldn’t have been threatened and I highly doubt Flex or any other free tools would have shown up at all.
As such, I think it’s up to the AJAX community to continue to provide an alternative. Work with Flex, sure, but once there’s no competition it could very well stagnate just like IE did once it achieved 90+ percent browser share. Microsoft went from their party line of “HTML Experience Everywhere – we are going to be the absolute best web experience company!” to “IE6 ought to be just about enough for anybody for the remainder of time.” That is, until Firefox finally became a plausible alternative and started to threaten that dominance.
I just have a hard time trusting Adobe in this arena. Nothing against the company (I continue to use PhotoShop and still occasionally use GoLive for some personal site work), but I just don’t trust them to be good gatekeepers of client side web application technology. And I can’t help but think I’m in a time warp back to 1996/97 whenever I hear about all of the great “rich application” crap Flex/Flash can bring.
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“The interface to JavaScript has been improved too with the Flash/Ajax bridge”
Don’t forget about the externalInterface in Flash 8 either :) I used it quite heavily when creating flashBug to allow me to interact with the Firebug console.
Unlike previous communication methods like getURL which was pretty much a one way street _ the externalInterface allows seamless communication. Once you have added your callbacks within Flash you can then access them like any other objects methods….._myFlash.method();
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Something that Ajax has over Flash is a knowledge cost of entry and not an economic and knowledge cost of entry.
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Regarding the first problem (back button), that’s what I’ve found yesterday on delicious IIRC:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
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Then finally, there’s the whole open source thing. Where do we start? I’ll start by saying that I’m not a religious person neither spirtually or technically. I’m a pragmatist and while I normally work in open source with its many benefits I can take a bit of proprietary action if need be. I’ve heard many members of the web standards and ajax communities basically strike Flash off on this point alone which to me is just insane.
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The interface to JavaScript has been improved too with the Flash/Ajax bridge (stupid name aside) but I think this can be improved further. It’s all a bit heavy on code and complex but sure it can be streamlined some. Unfortunately though, ActionScript continues it’s journey away from the land of dynamism but on the upside you do get E4X and all kinds of other nice stuff and we can’t do much about it. Even JS 2 is going this way.
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The bad programming environment problem is solved for us. Flex 2 is all text based and although a bit XMLy for my liking isn’t bad. You can even get a Textmate bundle for it. Most importantly you can lob it all in version control. Better.
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After re-examining these many are solvable, avoidable or have been solved recently.
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- Monolithic applications: Flash apps tend to exist at one URL, fail to respond to the back button well and generally work within their own environment in the browser rather than working with the browser.
- Bad programming environment: Working on a Flash app with more than one person was always a pain in the arse. Because a lot of the app was contained inside one or more FLA files which could only be opened by one person at a time and it was a binary file version control was a pain.
- Controls didn’t work enough like browser controls: The in-built components helped a bit but Flash select boxes, scroll bars and other widgets just didn’t look or act the same. Bad for usability.
- Accessibility no-no: Previously SWFs where essentially a black box to assistive technologies and event MX components seemed to have trouble with keyboard focus and tabbing. * Limited and tedious interface with JavaScript: Getting data in and out of the SWF was possible but never easy.
- ActionScript is heading toward Java: Oh man, don’t get me started. As ActionScript develop it becomes less and less dynamic. `You get native classes and packages but type annotations? I suppose you get a performance boost but really. Static types are for stupid people…we don’t need em
- It’s not open source
I lost interest with Flash mainly for these reasons:
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The sweet spot for JavaScript and Ajax has always been for those small, progressive enhancements rather than for creating rich interfaces. It seems to me that the more you head in that direction with JavaScript the more serious limitations you encounter. Browser JavaScript is never fast, has memory leak issues, browser bugs, CSS bugs and all manner of other tom foolery that, when you get to the stage of building something like for Google Maps get’s really time consuming and messy. There are many efforts (WHATWG, Tamarin etc etc) that are working toward solving many of these problems but for now and for the foreseeable future we are stuck with em. This, I think, is when it’s time to bring out Flash. Not for the whole app of course, but used in conjunction with HTML/CSS/JS. Flash however is not without it’s problems.
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Flash has some really quite incredible features that we struggle with implementing with HTML/CSS/JS: Sound, Dynamic vector drawing, Sockets, local storage, video. I could go on. Why the hell are we struggling with <canvas> and VML? Comet is essentially a hack while XMLSockets are built in to Flash…and then you have Red 5. To add to this, Apollo has just been released which is looking pretty interesting.
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I left the room with a mission: update my Flash knowledge by learning about ActionScript 3 and Flex 2 but more importantly examine more fully how Flash can fit in with more modern (read: trendy) web development trends like REST, semantics and friendly URLs and how this can all interface with JavaScript and HTML…
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In fact, it seems that hybrid Flash/Ajax applications have the best of both worlds and that developers who’s skills lie in both Flash and Ajax will become more and more valuable.
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both have their place and are not mutually exclusive
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Flash vs. Ajax: It's time to expand your toolbox
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25 Mar 07
Johann Richardn fact, it seems that hybrid Flash/Ajax applications have the best of both worlds and that developers who’s skills lie in both Flash and Ajax will become more and more valuable.
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