"According to information available from the Irish Companies Registration Office, Steorn has not filed accounts since October 28, 2004. Under current Companies Registration Office practice strike-off procedures could begin against Steorn by the end of October 2006. A strike-off would have serious consequences, such as the loss of Steorn's limited liability status. Furthermore, any assets of the company, including any patents or other intellectual property, would become the property of the Irish State."
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N
on
The Future of Flash
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· Score: 2, Informative
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
Right. The ubiquity of the Flash Player does lend itself well to providing a single solution to play/stream video without having to worry about the type of media player the user installed.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished.
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than.NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong. If you want to use a AJAX in your javascript you are definitely able to do so with the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit I mentioned above. If you mean you can't do asynchronous XML requests from Flash, then you're mistaken again. You have the ability to load XML either synchronously or asynchronously with the XML object in ActionScript 3.0 and 2.0 (but in 2.0 you can't do it explicitly).
Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it.
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a
I was about a foot away from calling you a douche bag so I apologize for almost doing that. Ok, not to post flame bait here, but the languages you mention above in your rebuttal...guess what? About two, possibly 3 of them can be deployed as Rich Internet Applications. So I think you may have missed the person's point about making "whole applications". I believe he's talking about "whole applications" for the web. And, if you can write an RIA in Assembly... I'll kiss your ass...
T
Just to inform the author of this article, RIA, in this context, stands for Rich Internet Application and NOT Rich Interactive Application. The term was originally coined by Macromedia in late 2003. In addition, Rich Interactive Application is a pretty generic term and could apply to any number of areas where an "application" of any sort (not just an Internet application) might be used.
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From Wikipedia.org: link: Steorn
"According to information available from the Irish Companies Registration Office, Steorn has not filed accounts since October 28, 2004. Under current Companies Registration Office practice strike-off procedures could begin against Steorn by the end of October 2006. A strike-off would have serious consequences, such as the loss of Steorn's limited liability status. Furthermore, any assets of the company, including any patents or other intellectual property, would become the property of the Irish State."
Link to Ireland's Companies Registration Office "strike off" policy.
This could mean curtains for these guys...
Chicken dinner!
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
.NET or J2EE. As for ActionScript 2.0, its API is based on the ECMA Script standard and can be as "complex" as JavaScript. I don't think you want to get into ActionScript 3.0 either because that my friend is about as close as you're going to get to a strongly-typed OO language. And, let's disucuss your usage of the word "complex". That's a pretty relative descriptor, don't you think? Whose "yardstick" are you using anyway? I wrote a job tracking system in Flash/ActionScript 2.0 that plotted jobs in two-dimensional conical space based on latitude and longitude using very "complex" trigonometry.
.NET developer? Java developer? And, "limited" how? You have quite an arsenal at your disposal in terms of executing server-side code when using Flash with Flash Remoting. I agree, most people won't be able or be willing to cough up the coin for Flash Remoting but with Flex 2.0 most of that functionality is built-in. I will say if you choose to use some of the data components in Flash (e.g. Web Services Connector) you are somewhat limited and have to do some extra work to get the desired results.
Right. The ubiquity of the Flash Player does lend itself well to providing a single solution to play/stream video without having to worry about the type of media player the user installed.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished.
Wrong. Flash has had an API since ActionScript 1.0, albeit less robust than
The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong, and really just a bad argument. You are most certainly not limited to using Flash exclusively as your presentation layer. You can easily establish communication between HTML and Flash with Adobe's Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit. Now, I will agree there aren't many ways to do this communication but the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit is the de facto standard. My question is, how else would you suggest doing it? Fortran and smoke signals? At least there is a standard way of accomplishing said communication.
Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all.
Wrong. If you want to use a AJAX in your javascript you are definitely able to do so with the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit I mentioned above. If you mean you can't do asynchronous XML requests from Flash, then you're mistaken again. You have the ability to load XML either synchronously or asynchronously with the XML object in ActionScript 3.0 and 2.0 (but in 2.0 you can't do it explicitly).
Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it.
Flawed reasoning, and here we go again with the relative terms. "Weird"? For whom? A PHP developer? C++ developer?
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a
I was about a foot away from calling you a douche bag so I apologize for almost doing that. Ok, not to post flame bait here, but the languages you mention above in your rebuttal...guess what? About two, possibly 3 of them can be deployed as Rich Internet Applications. So I think you may have missed the person's point about making "whole applications". I believe he's talking about "whole applications" for the web. And, if you can write an RIA in Assembly... I'll kiss your ass... T
Just to inform the author of this article, RIA, in this context, stands for Rich Internet Application and NOT Rich Interactive Application. The term was originally coined by Macromedia in late 2003. In addition, Rich Interactive Application is a pretty generic term and could apply to any number of areas where an "application" of any sort (not just an Internet application) might be used.