Sometimes /. is like the PETA of lost causes
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
Just because something is innovative, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is in fact progressive. It's as sad as getting a black-and-white plasma TV and thinking you've got game.
AJAX is just a collection of workarounds in a fancy box. Sure, it might be good for tiny apps where you want to spare your users a few page refreshes, but unless your company name ends in *oogle or *ahoo, you'll be hard pressed finding the resources to design/develop/cross-browser-debug/maintain anything complex. It has no dedicated IDE, no modern component set, no state management (iframes == workaround), no rich media tools, no cross-browser compatibility...and that's just off the top of my head.
But hey, I love that AJAX exists, and I think everybody should use AJAX!
After all, the more anachronistic web developers who use AJAX, the fewer who will use Flex, meaning there will be that many fewer *truely* bleeding edge web applications to compete with.
All I can say is 'fight the power, you anti-proprietary, anti-flash/.ers' and leave the RIA work to us misdirected Flex developers!
Let me lead the pack by saying Ajax is not the future, just the past's last gasp.
Ajax might seem like a dream combination of souped-up Javascript and souped-up HTML but really its old technology in a fancy wrapper. With all the cross-browser, cross-platform issues, lack of stateful sessions (I dare you to say 'cookie'), no decent IDE, and at the heart of it is just a hack. Elegant, yes, but a hack. This isn't web 2.0, this is web 1.1.
Now to really bring out the hate.
First, I hate crappy Flash banners, obtuse flash navigation systems, and pointless flash splash screens as much as everybody else, but what Macromedia Flex is bringing to the table almost makes up for it.
Visit http://labs.macromedia.com/ and you'll see the new version of Macromedia Flex, (which will be priced under $1000.00 for the IDE and compiler come the next version), and you can truly experience Web 2.0. This thing is a dream, builds fast, clean apps with professional components and containers on top of a powerful framework. This isn't Avalon bloatware, or lazlo OSS 'almost-ware', and it certainly isn't Ajax hack-ware, this is where the future of rich online applications are headed.
Try it (free to download the 120+ day Alpha) and then disagree. Or stay old-school, and play catch-up later on.
WTFx2, are you kidding me? I'm really tired of American's thinking they've got the corner on freedom, when they've let their country be taken over by lawyers and corporations. What's *free* about getting to vote for one of the two guys with the most money, best spin and right connections, rather than chosing a leader who actually has a clue and a plan of his own?
The *rest* of the world doesn't see America as the great land of opportunity anymore, but rather the great land of opportunists, where the average 'honest' guy fights an uphill battle against corporate litigation, pseudo-law that has been reinterpreted via corporate lobbyists to support their agendas (i.e. Software Patents), or military actions that sadly mirror the ones they use to justify who they are fighting (i.e. invading a country to protect its own sovereignty, when the hidden goal could only be oil).
America heaps over with great features and wonderful people, and produces some of the best of everything to be found on this planet, but don't for one second pretend that your country is somehow the last bastion of truth and freedom, and that the rest of the world, via the only legal global governing body, lacks not only the ability but the *right* to govern the internet.
And for those of you who will follow on with 1D patriotic 'fuck-you-and-the-donkey-but-obviously-not-a-repub lican-donkey-you-rode-in-on', if you can't take the criticism then more's the shame on you, because nobody's buying what your selling anymore.
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There's nothing wrong with pissing in the wind, just make sure you are facing the right way when you do it.
Check out MTASC, the open source flash compiler, or GPLFlash, the open source flash player. Amazing what they can do with such a closed and secretive format.
Modded down by what, a coward avoiding the truth? Come on, dude, grow a backbone! Or is/. just a dumping ground for disgruntled nerds who can't accept that the general population doesn't bow to their terrific marketing tactics('commercial software sucks, dude...you suck if you use it, dude' is about as sophisticated as I've seen...only missing the 'just hire a guy like me to make it work' truth bit that you usually only see in big evil corps.).
Flash is very good at what it does. MTASC (OSS) is a much better compiler (faster, stricter) than the Flash compiler. FDT is a fantastic IDE (build for Eclipse...my God Commercial software using OSS as a base...my head's gonna explode!) and much better than Dreamweaver/Flash for development and probably better than Zorn (Macromedia's new Eclipse IDE).
Just stop pissing in the wind and let people on the other side of the argument have a voice, or you just start looking like the rest of American (well, fine, World) news and media.
------
Reality only affects those who participate.
I thought nerds were supposed to be smart!
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Okay, enough of the mis-directed Flash-bashing. Is this just a nerd thing...the cool geeks on/. seem to hate Flash, so I hate it too!
I mean really, do you blame photoshop every time you see a bad image? Video cameras for bad commercials? Shit, lets blame guns for war and give politicians a break!
Flash is a powerful, relatively easy tool to use for developing everything from annoying ads to cool, slick, easy-to-use web applications and games. That, unfortunately, means that many clueless usability-impaired newbies can use Flash to create equally useless splash screens and seizure-inducing Ads. Maybe they should make Flash more like MIA or Lightwave, eh? Then only the smart, nerdy types could use it.
Oh, and from what I've read Sparkle doesn't 'describe' the objects in XML as far as the Forms/UI goes, it uses XML to position, size, and adjust an object's attributes. XML files like that are like 5-10K for most forms. It isn't just a big document of vector descriptions...(take a look at Macromedia Flex if you want to see what they are trying to do)...so settle down on the 'my god the files will be huge' melodrama. It'll suck just fine being a Microsoft product without all the misaligned conjecture and assumptions.
Oh, and since this is probably going to get modded into oblivion by some pissed off Flash-hater, I'll just add that OpenLazlo sucks...just what we need, learn yet another task-specific language to develop a code-embedded-in-design-godforsaken-mess-to-mainta in-application for the sake of OOP.
Some year's I've made $35,000.00, others (well...one) I made over $200,000.00. Depends on so many factors, the industry you cater to, the country, the type of development, but most importantly: if you are working for yourself (better $$$, no sleep) or others (worse $$$, a tiny bit more sleep), or both (best $$$, sleep when your dead).
What's more important is who you work for; cheap corporate 'meat for the machine' development houses who don't pay overtime makes that $45,000/year worth a lot less than a small independant house who plays BBall on friday afternoons.
----------
If picking on you won't help, then I'm really in trouble.
Macromedia are beginning to strongly push another product version of Flash called "Flash Lite", which is a mobile version of their Flash software. The verbage in this EULA may just be a rather low method of encouraging portable device developers to embed this version of Flash Player instead of the full version. This would allow consistency in development practices between the two platform types/markets, and more importantly give the product some chance of surviving in a world where the restricted devices see an ever increasing level of performance, drive space and power.
Instead of wasting your time with convoluted, non-friendly DHTML/Javascript (read: AJAX) applications that are not cross-browser/cross-platform friendly by any measure, you take a look at what Flash can do in the way of RIA development. Easier to develop, cleaner, better user experience, more accessible, far fewer incompatibility issues, looks better, WTF else do you need? If it slows your computer down, thats down to shit-poor programming, not Flash itself.
Blaming Flash because a bunch off A$$holes design annoying ads and cheesedicks who think Flash is an excuse to create useless splash screens is like blaming your Television for bad commercials and movie cameras for Ben Afleck.
Or am I wrong? Maybe we should start slamming GIMP for all the tasteless JPEG advertising and GIF animations? Those bastards! 'course, only decent folk use OSS, so those guys must be using PhotoShop...
The introduction of foreign wildlife into countries, be it animal or plant, has proven to be disastrous in many cases. Look at Australia, which has been ravaged by rabbits, foxes, feral pigs, has more wild cats than Kangaroos, and whose indigenous plant life has been supplanted on every corner by blackberries, pear cactus and a host of other invaders. Sometimes this was intentional, but more often these populations came about because of escapes and accidental releases.
Elephants, lions, cheetahs and everything else that died out on the continent did so because of natural selection, disease, a balance to the ecosystem and whatever other natural phenomenon deemed it should be so. This is just pure arrogance and ego-stroking; these are the kinds of clowns that would actually try and put a Velociraptor back on terra firma, and never once suspect that something might go wrong.
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I don't think shaking a stick at the morons is helping...
I'm not exactly sure how a wadded up ball of ground chuck with a bit of salt and pepper qualifies as haut cuisine (maybe in the Midwest?) With this kind of appetite, I don't see how pseudo-beef would be that unappealing to you...now give me 16 oz. of Kobe beef done rare and an ice cold Big Rock beer, and then your talking goot eating!
On another note, I wonder if this is thrilling the pants off people in India (sorry for the visual); burgers off the hoof, so to speak...or would this be regarded a corruption of something sacred?
----
I'm drowning here, and you're describing the water!
"So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience"
This is part I've always hated; that I have never been able to manage the experience myself. I do like some cookies very much (like the/. cookie) and hate other cookies just as much (stop following me, adverts!), and wish the mechanism could be rewritten to allow for more granular control over the type of cookie I allow. Sure, this is a nerd thing, and Joe Average would probably be more likely to just nuke everything that popped up, but at least they'd remain useful for the minority of people who know how to handle them.
In another vein: as they stand now, cookies are all but useless; I stand in wide-mouthed amazement whenever anybody tells me they use them for anything more than login storage or minor, non-mission critical stuff. If you can't count on them being there for even a minor part of the population (never mind upwards of 40%), they are as useful to web development as goto commands are to OOP programming.
I say dump cookies, and start working on something better so we can see '40% of users are reported as deleting their brownies on a regular basis!' and forget all about our cookie woes.
-----------
Take the database hit and be a man about it, damned it!
---Descartes
AJAX has about as much chance of replacing/supplanting the desktop OS as software patents proving to be worthwhile. It does answer to a lot of the problems of client-side apps, but is hardly the end-all and be-all of browser compatibility. The *only* way to do that is to have the application run inside of an independent player/interface like Java or Flash.
Javascript/AJAX is tied to stock HTML controls, has no real persistence (and don't say 'cookie' unless you want to be glared at), is most definitely not browser-generic, and can (and will) break as new Browser versions are released with 'fixes' that break the numerous workarounds that AJAX has to rely upon.
Now, I realize Flash has never been taken seriously as an application tool, mostly because the entry level for using it has left every tool with a mouse and too much free time the ability to annoy us with pointless splash screens, unusable interfaces and incomprehensible navigation systems, and also because it was hair-rippingly slow, had poor text rendering, and lacked good UI components.
But this is changing. With their new product, the vapidly over-priced Flex, Macromedia has introduced the world to a workable, streamlined and semi-intelligent IDE/framework for developing decent browser applications. More importantly, it has shown more industrious developers that they can use it to develop their own frameworks, and both together promise to make Flash a much stronger (but still very, very unlikely) desktop killer. As to the other problems, between Flex and the forthcoming Maelstrom product is much faster thanks to bit-caching, text rendering is very good, and the UI component set has become very solid and much more comprehensive.
The most important note here, however, is that until a browser app has access to system-level resources, it will never perform as well or be as powerful as a desktop application except in the certain roles like data management/manipulation or user interaction.
Just as a footnote, the reason I wouldn't put Java up front is because the development time for Java apps is way too long for the type of application that belongs in the browser as opposed as to a desktop application (not troll-bait, just my opinion).
I would like to have this technology
This doesn't make the argument any more valid than saying Guns should be legal because they protect some people. Administrative woes? Well, that's more than worth the slight possibility (dripping with sarcasm, there) that the government, let alone criminals, might misuse it.
If this is such a concern, get the medic-alert bracelet people to extend their program to include chips, and make wearable (and disabled-by-default) chips for the rest of us. If you can't control the technology from a personal standpoint, then it opens the door to Gattica and Logan's Run and solves nothing. Everybody agrees there are positive sides to some arguments, like gun control (or gun ownership) and legalizing drugs, but weighing the successes against all the negative impacts on society, as well as the realistic benefits of blanket policies, is what is important. Missing the point of what the government would do with the technology is the sort of 1D thinking that gets this stuff passed into law.
P.S. I hope you aren't the first doctor to accidentally kill some petty criminal with a hacked/stolen RFID that he uses to get free cell phone calls or prescription drugs... 'Gee, officer, his chip said he was AB-, and I just assumed that it was correct...'
Slashdot Mirror
Just because something is innovative, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is in fact progressive. It's as sad as getting a black-and-white plasma TV and thinking you've got game.
/.ers' and leave the RIA work to us misdirected Flex developers!
AJAX is just a collection of workarounds in a fancy box. Sure, it might be good for tiny apps where you want to spare your users a few page refreshes, but unless your company name ends in *oogle or *ahoo, you'll be hard pressed finding the resources to design/develop/cross-browser-debug/maintain anything complex. It has no dedicated IDE, no modern component set, no state management (iframes == workaround), no rich media tools, no cross-browser compatibility...and that's just off the top of my head.
But hey, I love that AJAX exists, and I think everybody should use AJAX!
After all, the more anachronistic web developers who use AJAX, the fewer who will use Flex, meaning there will be that many fewer *truely* bleeding edge web applications to compete with.
All I can say is 'fight the power, you anti-proprietary, anti-flash
--------
Cynicism is just arrogance wrapped in distain.
Let me lead the pack by saying Ajax is not the future, just the past's last gasp. Ajax might seem like a dream combination of souped-up Javascript and souped-up HTML but really its old technology in a fancy wrapper. With all the cross-browser, cross-platform issues, lack of stateful sessions (I dare you to say 'cookie'), no decent IDE, and at the heart of it is just a hack. Elegant, yes, but a hack. This isn't web 2.0, this is web 1.1.
Now to really bring out the hate.
First, I hate crappy Flash banners, obtuse flash navigation systems, and pointless flash splash screens as much as everybody else, but what Macromedia Flex is bringing to the table almost makes up for it.
Visit http://labs.macromedia.com/ and you'll see the new version of Macromedia Flex, (which will be priced under $1000.00 for the IDE and compiler come the next version), and you can truly experience Web 2.0. This thing is a dream, builds fast, clean apps with professional components and containers on top of a powerful framework. This isn't Avalon bloatware, or lazlo OSS 'almost-ware', and it certainly isn't Ajax hack-ware, this is where the future of rich online applications are headed.
Try it (free to download the 120+ day Alpha) and then disagree. Or stay old-school, and play catch-up later on.
WTFx2, are you kidding me? I'm really tired of American's thinking they've got the corner on freedom, when they've let their country be taken over by lawyers and corporations. What's *free* about getting to vote for one of the two guys with the most money, best spin and right connections, rather than chosing a leader who actually has a clue and a plan of his own?
b lican-donkey-you-rode-in-on', if you can't take the criticism then more's the shame on you, because nobody's buying what your selling anymore.
The *rest* of the world doesn't see America as the great land of opportunity anymore, but rather the great land of opportunists, where the average 'honest' guy fights an uphill battle against corporate litigation, pseudo-law that has been reinterpreted via corporate lobbyists to support their agendas (i.e. Software Patents), or military actions that sadly mirror the ones they use to justify who they are fighting (i.e. invading a country to protect its own sovereignty, when the hidden goal could only be oil).
America heaps over with great features and wonderful people, and produces some of the best of everything to be found on this planet, but don't for one second pretend that your country is somehow the last bastion of truth and freedom, and that the rest of the world, via the only legal global governing body, lacks not only the ability but the *right* to govern the internet.
And for those of you who will follow on with 1D patriotic 'fuck-you-and-the-donkey-but-obviously-not-a-repu
----
There's nothing wrong with pissing in the wind, just make sure you are facing the right way when you do it.
Of course flash is a closed standard. Macromedia has published a closed document detailing their closed file format:
l e_format_specification.pdf
/. just a dumping ground for disgruntled nerds who can't accept that the general population doesn't bow to their terrific marketing tactics('commercial software sucks, dude...you suck if you use it, dude' is about as sophisticated as I've seen...only missing the 'just hire a guy like me to make it work' truth bit that you usually only see in big evil corps.).
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/flash_fi
Check out MTASC, the open source flash compiler, or GPLFlash, the open source flash player. Amazing what they can do with such a closed and secretive format.
Modded down by what, a coward avoiding the truth? Come on, dude, grow a backbone! Or is
Flash is very good at what it does. MTASC (OSS) is a much better compiler (faster, stricter) than the Flash compiler. FDT is a fantastic IDE (build for Eclipse...my God Commercial software using OSS as a base...my head's gonna explode!) and much better than Dreamweaver/Flash for development and probably better than Zorn (Macromedia's new Eclipse IDE).
Just stop pissing in the wind and let people on the other side of the argument have a voice, or you just start looking like the rest of American (well, fine, World) news and media.
------
Reality only affects those who participate.
Okay, enough of the mis-directed Flash-bashing. Is this just a nerd thing...the cool geeks on /. seem to hate Flash, so I hate it too!
a in-application for the sake of OOP.
I mean really, do you blame photoshop every time you see a bad image? Video cameras for bad commercials? Shit, lets blame guns for war and give politicians a break!
Flash is a powerful, relatively easy tool to use for developing everything from annoying ads to cool, slick, easy-to-use web applications and games. That, unfortunately, means that many clueless usability-impaired newbies can use Flash to create equally useless splash screens and seizure-inducing Ads. Maybe they should make Flash more like MIA or Lightwave, eh? Then only the smart, nerdy types could use it.
Oh, and from what I've read Sparkle doesn't 'describe' the objects in XML as far as the Forms/UI goes, it uses XML to position, size, and adjust an object's attributes. XML files like that are like 5-10K for most forms. It isn't just a big document of vector descriptions...(take a look at Macromedia Flex if you want to see what they are trying to do)...so settle down on the 'my god the files will be huge' melodrama. It'll suck just fine being a Microsoft product without all the misaligned conjecture and assumptions.
Oh, and since this is probably going to get modded into oblivion by some pissed off Flash-hater, I'll just add that OpenLazlo sucks...just what we need, learn yet another task-specific language to develop a code-embedded-in-design-godforsaken-mess-to-maint
There, done bitching, go on about your business.
Some year's I've made $35,000.00, others (well...one) I made over $200,000.00. Depends on so many factors, the industry you cater to, the country, the type of development, but most importantly: if you are working for yourself (better $$$, no sleep) or others (worse $$$, a tiny bit more sleep), or both (best $$$, sleep when your dead).
What's more important is who you work for; cheap corporate 'meat for the machine' development houses who don't pay overtime makes that $45,000/year worth a lot less than a small independant house who plays BBall on friday afternoons.
----------
If picking on you won't help, then I'm really in trouble.
Macromedia are beginning to strongly push another product version of Flash called "Flash Lite", which is a mobile version of their Flash software. The verbage in this EULA may just be a rather low method of encouraging portable device developers to embed this version of Flash Player instead of the full version. This would allow consistency in development practices between the two platform types/markets, and more importantly give the product some chance of surviving in a world where the restricted devices see an ever increasing level of performance, drive space and power.
Or, they're just eee-vil. Hard to say, really.
Perhaps you should just educate yourself then.
Instead of wasting your time with convoluted, non-friendly DHTML/Javascript (read: AJAX) applications that are not cross-browser/cross-platform friendly by any measure, you take a look at what Flash can do in the way of RIA development. Easier to develop, cleaner, better user experience, more accessible, far fewer incompatibility issues, looks better, WTF else do you need? If it slows your computer down, thats down to shit-poor programming, not Flash itself.
Blaming Flash because a bunch off A$$holes design annoying ads and cheesedicks who think Flash is an excuse to create useless splash screens is like blaming your Television for bad commercials and movie cameras for Ben Afleck.
Or am I wrong? Maybe we should start slamming GIMP for all the tasteless JPEG advertising and GIF animations? Those bastards! 'course, only decent folk use OSS, so those guys must be using PhotoShop...
1 AM?
Slacker...
The introduction of foreign wildlife into countries, be it animal or plant, has proven to be disastrous in many cases. Look at Australia, which has been ravaged by rabbits, foxes, feral pigs, has more wild cats than Kangaroos, and whose indigenous plant life has been supplanted on every corner by blackberries, pear cactus and a host of other invaders. Sometimes this was intentional, but more often these populations came about because of escapes and accidental releases.
Elephants, lions, cheetahs and everything else that died out on the continent did so because of natural selection, disease, a balance to the ecosystem and whatever other natural phenomenon deemed it should be so. This is just pure arrogance and ego-stroking; these are the kinds of clowns that would actually try and put a Velociraptor back on terra firma, and never once suspect that something might go wrong.
-----
I don't think shaking a stick at the morons is helping...
I'm not exactly sure how a wadded up ball of ground chuck with a bit of salt and pepper qualifies as haut cuisine (maybe in the Midwest?) With this kind of appetite, I don't see how pseudo-beef would be that unappealing to you...now give me 16 oz. of Kobe beef done rare and an ice cold Big Rock beer, and then your talking goot eating!
On another note, I wonder if this is thrilling the pants off people in India (sorry for the visual); burgers off the hoof, so to speak...or would this be regarded a corruption of something sacred?
----
I'm drowning here, and you're describing the water!
"So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience"
/. cookie) and hate other cookies just as much (stop following me, adverts!), and wish the mechanism could be rewritten to allow for more granular control over the type of cookie I allow. Sure, this is a nerd thing, and Joe Average would probably be more likely to just nuke everything that popped up, but at least they'd remain useful for the minority of people who know how to handle them.
This is part I've always hated; that I have never been able to manage the experience myself. I do like some cookies very much (like the
In another vein: as they stand now, cookies are all but useless; I stand in wide-mouthed amazement whenever anybody tells me they use them for anything more than login storage or minor, non-mission critical stuff. If you can't count on them being there for even a minor part of the population (never mind upwards of 40%), they are as useful to web development as goto commands are to OOP programming.
I say dump cookies, and start working on something better so we can see '40% of users are reported as deleting their brownies on a regular basis!' and forget all about our cookie woes.
-----------
Take the database hit and be a man about it, damned it!
---Descartes
AJAX has about as much chance of replacing/supplanting the desktop OS as software patents proving to be worthwhile. It does answer to a lot of the problems of client-side apps, but is hardly the end-all and be-all of browser compatibility. The *only* way to do that is to have the application run inside of an independent player/interface like Java or Flash.
Javascript/AJAX is tied to stock HTML controls, has no real persistence (and don't say 'cookie' unless you want to be glared at), is most definitely not browser-generic, and can (and will) break as new Browser versions are released with 'fixes' that break the numerous workarounds that AJAX has to rely upon.
Now, I realize Flash has never been taken seriously as an application tool, mostly because the entry level for using it has left every tool with a mouse and too much free time the ability to annoy us with pointless splash screens, unusable interfaces and incomprehensible navigation systems, and also because it was hair-rippingly slow, had poor text rendering, and lacked good UI components.
But this is changing. With their new product, the vapidly over-priced Flex, Macromedia has introduced the world to a workable, streamlined and semi-intelligent IDE/framework for developing decent browser applications. More importantly, it has shown more industrious developers that they can use it to develop their own frameworks, and both together promise to make Flash a much stronger (but still very, very unlikely) desktop killer. As to the other problems, between Flex and the forthcoming Maelstrom product is much faster thanks to bit-caching, text rendering is very good, and the UI component set has become very solid and much more comprehensive.
The most important note here, however, is that until a browser app has access to system-level resources, it will never perform as well or be as powerful as a desktop application except in the certain roles like data management/manipulation or user interaction.
Just as a footnote, the reason I wouldn't put Java up front is because the development time for Java apps is way too long for the type of application that belongs in the browser as opposed as to a desktop application (not troll-bait, just my opinion).
------------
Look, over there, another for-cristsakes menu!
I would like to have this technology This doesn't make the argument any more valid than saying Guns should be legal because they protect some people. Administrative woes? Well, that's more than worth the slight possibility (dripping with sarcasm, there) that the government, let alone criminals, might misuse it.
If this is such a concern, get the medic-alert bracelet people to extend their program to include chips, and make wearable (and disabled-by-default) chips for the rest of us. If you can't control the technology from a personal standpoint, then it opens the door to Gattica and Logan's Run and solves nothing. Everybody agrees there are positive sides to some arguments, like gun control (or gun ownership) and legalizing drugs, but weighing the successes against all the negative impacts on society, as well as the realistic benefits of blanket policies, is what is important. Missing the point of what the government would do with the technology is the sort of 1D thinking that gets this stuff passed into law.
P.S. I hope you aren't the first doctor to accidentally kill some petty criminal with a hacked/stolen RFID that he uses to get free cell phone calls or prescription drugs... 'Gee, officer, his chip said he was AB-, and I just assumed that it was correct...'