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WhyFlash

Why Flash, (a general technology ascessment)

Context/Disclaimer- The following contains a great amount of opinion, coming from a Zope developer with very recent experiences working with a Flash-heavy designer on a farily large web application. Commens welcome

The Flash development enviornment has for a very long time now been a dominant technology on the web for creating vector graphics. In recent years, it has grown from an animation and motion graphics tool, into being a full-fledged object oriented graphics programming enviornment.

The base concepts behind Flash are:

  • to utilize a simple vector graphics format which naturally makes for small file sizes, in the context of transmitting graphical information.
  • to have a functional interface for quickly and visually authoring complex, time-based visual information (the FlashAuthoringEnviornment?)
  • all of this making for incredibly small file sizes, (when few bitmap graphics are used)

These are the best fuffilled promises over the years by Macromedia, and these elemts alone have created huge and diverse communities of FlashDevelopers?. The These features have given Macromedia impressive adoption of the Flash Plug-In- Available for Windows, on the Mac, and also on Linux.

In recent releases of Flash- Flash 5 and now FlashMX? (Flash 6), the development enviornment has become substantially more robust. ActionScript? grew up in the biggest way, and fully adopted a very excellent object-oriented structure. Flash MX now possesses

  • A full GUI application development enviornment, with loads of prefab visual objects (as well as the ability to create libraries of re-usable visual objects)
  • the ability to fufill the original Client-Side GUI promises of Java (in the context of Web Applications and Services), which argueably have not yet come to the kind of developer-wide adoption that the pace of web development has required.
  • Madly optimized tools for XML parsing, as well as some fairly exotic options for server/client communications.
  • A full Object-Oriented Coding enviornment availible through ActionScript?, which has a suprisingly similar functional syntax to Python! (ActionScript?, being built to mimic Java, and more directly JavaScript?, I'm told)

--

Flash, carrying massive browser plug-in adoption and killer designers and developers spawning massive FlashCommunities?, is now poised to become a powerfull tool in extending the usefull vocabulary of web applications, (see Zope Book, page 1) and the rapidly growing ranges of Web Services .

For more information/discussion see the AlternateWebAppGUIS page.

Also, if your not convinced, this is a great article- http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/08/16/pet_market.html?page=1
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