At 12:11 PM 2/8/2, Cantrell, Adam wrote:
> Does anyone else see the sick irony of this? Macromedia is moving
> to replace Java with Flash as the client-side GUI because java is
> too slow, handles differently in various VM's, and is basically a
> big POS, but on the serverside, their whole next release will be
> built on this same technology.
I love irony too, but maybe it's more useful to distinguish a language,
from a particular interpreter of that language, from the distributed
capability to use that language.
Java as a language is great, has a lot of nice features. There's nothing
intrinsically wrong with it.
On your server you usually know which Java machine you're dealing with.
It's workable, practical.
But in browsers we've got different versions of competing Java Virtual
Machines to deal with, and a decreasing total audience. To send a set of
Java instructions to the world at large you have to account for all their
differences in interpretation.
It's just like the browser wars: although the spec is codified, there are
various competing proprietary engines out there.
The advantages the Macromedia Flash Player offers over every other
client-side web technology are that:
(a) it's a single engine of known ability;
(b) it is already widespread over desktop computers and increasingly
over portable and embedded devices; and
(c) its small size and wide usage makes its update rate very quick...
most consumers had the last version of the Player within six months
of its release.
Neo sort of straddles a middle ground... it is built to run atop a variety
of server-side Java engines, and so requires more work than running on a
single known server, or using the single known Macromedia Flash Player.
That's work that we have to do, though, and if you're running on a tested
and recommended Java-based server then the differences in Java
implementation should not be visible to you. You're just dealing with a
single server, and the execution environment is known and predictable.
Summary: The issue isn't so much "Java vs Flash vs C-based ColdFusion",
more like "how can you predict and control the environment in which code is
executed".
Realworld capability is *much* more significant than merely writing a
language or an interpreter.
> please don't take this as a flame to macromedia, more of a social
> commentary.
No worries, but if you could trim the quotes that'd be cool too, thanks...
I always sort of shudder when I see my own sig in someone else's post....
;-)
jd
John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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