

Why Flash can't win the Web application war - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2008/12/10/why-flash-cant-win-the-web-application-war.aspx

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swombat
As a heavy user of Flex for my start-up, I have to, heavy-heartedly, agree
with the main point of this article.

Wake up Macrobe! Ajax, as loose and amorphous and crap as it is still today,
is going to eat your lunch!

Flex Builder should be free and open-source and Adobe should encourage people
to improve on it. They could steal much of the effort that's currently going
into other RIA platforms by being more openly supportive and aggressively
marketing that openness. The fact that they don't do that is simply mind-
boggling.

~~~
mcargian
Can I ask why you chose Flex over the Ajax approach? What features were only
in Flex that you felt this was a better approach?

~~~
swombat
Several reasons, but the key one was that to build the kind of user experience
we were aiming for, Ajax would have been a major, major, major nightmare - and
probably not even possible (especially 1.5 years ago, but still today). With
Flex, we got a very different set of compromises that worked out much better
for the users.

~~~
flashgordon
actually i agree.. if you want a UI that is consistent and easy to build, flex
has a few hands up over ajax...

ive been using flex builder for linux for a while... and frankly after trying
out the windows (fully functional) trial version, i felt the windows version
did not justify the price... sure there are a couple of superficial things the
windows version has (like the design view - which is "ok")..

only gripe is the linux version is still in alpha so feel a bit jibbed and not
to mention hesitant paying full price for it...

the real issue for me is they are leveraging so much of the eclipse framework
to build an IDE, they should have more of an obligation to give it away for
free, unlike MS (with its VS products)

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gruseom
It isn't only that the tools cost money and the format is less open. If I
believed that Flash were superior technology for what we're doing (a complex
web app), we'd be using it. For me, the real issue is that Flash doesn't fit
the web as well as Ajax. That's a big deal.

One hears frequent complaints about how awful it is to have to cobble
applications out of HTML/JS/CSS and coax them into running in browsers that
were never designed for that. That's true, but it begs a question: why, if
it's so awful, do so many people do it? It must have huge value to justify all
that effort.

There are all kinds of subtle differences between programming for the web and
programming for a desktop-like environment embedded in a web browser. I think
it's a mistake to assume that the latter would be better if only we could have
it.

There's another way to look at this. One reason the "bad" approach often
succeeds while the "good" approach fails is that what seems good is based on
previous experiences that don't quite fit what's emerging. Meanwhile the "bad"
approaches seem bad because they're messy and chaotic, yet they contain
something important and new that is worth the messiness. This is how I look at
Flash. People want to program in what they think of as the proper way to build
applications. But if it comes at the cost of taking the "web" out of web apps,
it's not worth it.

~~~
flashgordon
why are people "cobbling out applications if it is so hard?" - shame for one.
I think many people feel ashamed to abandon the hard path and take the easy
path. But, open standards aside (which should be the real reason), if
something fits well (both as a solution and with adoption) why not?

~~~
gruseom
_why are people "cobbling out applications if it is so hard?" - shame for
one._

Oh come on. There are a lot of smart people making Ajax apps. They can't all
be doing it for a dumb reason.

~~~
flashgordon
actually shame is not such a dumb reason... combine that with uncertainty of
the future...

if an open standard fails then people wont get too much flak for following it
as it was an "open" standard..

starting following or adopting a proprietary and how are you going to explain
(to who ever you have to explain) your choice of the chosen standard, when (a)
open standards do take over or (b) a different proprietary standard wins the
war?

dont get me wrong.. i never said smart people dont do Ajax. On the contrary
you have to have lots of patience and brains to want to play around with the
inconsistencies with a billion browsers. Lack of said brain cells made me take
the easy way out ...

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friism
It's worth noting that Flex Builder 3 is free for students:
<https://freeriatools.adobe.com/flex/>

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alizaki
a) Bit-torrent puts Flash in the hands of everyone who wants it. Abode just
wants to collect when you build something great with it.

b) Adobe sells Flash for less than 60$ at my university. In fact, they sell
all of the CS for that price...

~~~
Tichy
I don't want to install pirated software (not only because of the danger of
trojans), and I am not a student.

~~~
tomsaffell
I agree with the principle, but Adobe's offer a free download and a 60 day
trial license, so the risk of trojans can be be entirely mitigated for
pirates.

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cousin_it
I use MTASC for AS2 development and haXe for AS3, both are open source and
work perfectly. We've rolled out online maps in Flash for corporate clients
without me ever touching the Flash IDE, never mind Flex.

~~~
myth_drannon
Flex SDK is also free and open source, (Flex Builder is the $$$) , anyone can
just download and start building Flex applications (well except the Charting
components). You can also use Intellij IDE for Flex development(cheaper). We
used FAME development in my previous startup and there is a big difference in
development in Fame and in Flex - I prefer Flex.

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bprater
For any of you working with creating "apps-in-the-browser", ExtJS is a pretty
well-thought out platform.

It's a JS framework that includes many of the common widgets you find on the
desktop.

Google 'ext samples' and prepare to be impressed.

I recently stumbled on it and have been aggressively rolling it out in my
company.

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josefresco
17 external links on that one article. I'd much rather see them collected at
the bottom for 'reference'.

~~~
bprater
Agreed, my first instinct was article spam.

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subbu
It could also be because Adobe controls how Flash behaves in the browser. If
it suddenly changes some security feature in its Flash player and release it,
browsers automatically download the player (users don't really care which
version of Flash player they have and usually upgrade to a latest release) and
suddenly your content stops working. Fixing it won't be an easy task. You need
Flash software to compile the movie and your scripts. Not so with JavaScript
and any other open languages. This was one of the reasons why I moved out of
Flash/ActionScript world.

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allenbrunson
pre-internet, the usual path towards success in the tech world was 1) spend a
billion or two to create a monopoly, then 2) soak your customers for all you
can get. examples: lotus, compuserve, aol. post-internet, it is now far easier
for good ideas to triumph over companies with big piles of cash.

adobe looks to me like a company that's still trying to play by the old rules.
it's amazing to me that they've lasted as long as they have.

~~~
tl
Autodesk is also still doing well. The formula for Abode, Autodesk and friends
is to write an application that can't easy be duplicated in a browser, that
businesses will buy for employees, and then build a barrier thought file
formats and marketing to prevent other desktop software from competing.

~~~
allenbrunson
yeah, that's a better explanation of how that model might still work today.

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bprater
I'd like to know who the author thinks is giving Flash a run for it's money
with some evidence. Silverlight? HTML+Canvas+Ajax+JS?

(If it's possible to blast pixels on a webpage quickly enough, I'm sure we'll
see frameworks popping out of the later. ExtJS doesn't use Canvas and it's
very app-like.)

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chaostheory
flash is a public document spec and Adobe allows other people to build editors
and even players (which has been happening)

~~~
allenbrunson
the .swf format is open, but the .fla format is definitely NOT open. that
makes it impossible for third parties to build competitors to adobe flash
cs3/cs4.

