Flash is your friend in Web 2.0? Really?
I just caught an interesting presentation by Macromedia's Kevin Lynch in which he debuted alphas for Macromedia's Flex 2.0 and Flash 8.5. Kevin touches nicely on the evolution of machine-to-human interaction of data Web 2.0 delivers, building upon the machine-to-machine benefits web services have promoted. He also reinforces the fact that HTML is still heavily used and is a big part of Flash 8 presentations, and stresses the code-generation capabilities of the IDE. In all, it's very impressive.
But the major theme of the talk was the maturity of Flash as app suite, wrapped up in the "Flash Is Your Friend in Web 2.0" mantra. Will Flash become a dominant tool to building dynamic web applications with rich-client UIs? I don't think so.
The main thing working against Flash is that it became relegated to be a tool strictly used for building fancy UIs, but I've not seen a lot of examples of Flash-based forms being used to process data. Too many times I've seen developers break out Flash for a tiny banner ad or header with long-form animation, just for the sake of having a fancy graphic with optimized loading. It's been dramatically underutilized, I think on that we can all agree.
It's also the victim of its own innovation. There are so many cool things you can do with Flash that are Photoshop-esque that programming purists don't give it the time of day. Integrating Flash with other server-side platforms historically hasn't really taken off, either. Dreamweaver bombed as an ASP.NET IDE, and sparse ASP.NET examples popped up, hackily combining Flash MX ActionScript with remoting for dynamic data presentation, and that's about it. It certainly wasn't easy to do, and so it never became widely-used practice.
Flash became (which Kevin admits in the talk) more of a tool for creative, non-programming folk to develop animations, not interactive, functional applications. Thus many web properties outside of big-budget movie sites heavily using Flash were style without substance. Macromedia bought ColdFusion to try to ally this, but it couldn't keep up with developments in the enterprise space - ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages/servlets - and was too top-heavy amidst the emergence of PHP.
But once again, Google's come to the rescue. Google Video is chock full of AJAX, DHTML and presents stored clips as streaming Flash video. I'm interested in Flash 8+ for the video capabilities it has and I'm checking it out more as a means of writing dynamic applications components, even as I implement more and more Web 2.0 concepts into my site. If the ability to generate, output and transform XHTML is possible, I'm there. Likewise for the ability to build and process native HTML forms. If there's also a better ability for me to seamlessly incorporate - not replace - a non-Macromedia server platform, that'll be sweet and I might consider making it my defaultauthoring tool.
But I'm staying with .NET/J2EE for my main server-side development.
But the major theme of the talk was the maturity of Flash as app suite, wrapped up in the "Flash Is Your Friend in Web 2.0" mantra. Will Flash become a dominant tool to building dynamic web applications with rich-client UIs? I don't think so.
The main thing working against Flash is that it became relegated to be a tool strictly used for building fancy UIs, but I've not seen a lot of examples of Flash-based forms being used to process data. Too many times I've seen developers break out Flash for a tiny banner ad or header with long-form animation, just for the sake of having a fancy graphic with optimized loading. It's been dramatically underutilized, I think on that we can all agree.
It's also the victim of its own innovation. There are so many cool things you can do with Flash that are Photoshop-esque that programming purists don't give it the time of day. Integrating Flash with other server-side platforms historically hasn't really taken off, either. Dreamweaver bombed as an ASP.NET IDE, and sparse ASP.NET examples popped up, hackily combining Flash MX ActionScript with remoting for dynamic data presentation, and that's about it. It certainly wasn't easy to do, and so it never became widely-used practice.
Flash became (which Kevin admits in the talk) more of a tool for creative, non-programming folk to develop animations, not interactive, functional applications. Thus many web properties outside of big-budget movie sites heavily using Flash were style without substance. Macromedia bought ColdFusion to try to ally this, but it couldn't keep up with developments in the enterprise space - ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages/servlets - and was too top-heavy amidst the emergence of PHP.
But once again, Google's come to the rescue. Google Video is chock full of AJAX, DHTML and presents stored clips as streaming Flash video. I'm interested in Flash 8+ for the video capabilities it has and I'm checking it out more as a means of writing dynamic applications components, even as I implement more and more Web 2.0 concepts into my site. If the ability to generate, output and transform XHTML is possible, I'm there. Likewise for the ability to build and process native HTML forms. If there's also a better ability for me to seamlessly incorporate - not replace - a non-Macromedia server platform, that'll be sweet and I might consider making it my defaultauthoring tool.
But I'm staying with .NET/J2EE for my main server-side development.
posted by Jason Salas @ 4:38 PM
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