You're right. The audience really dictates your options. My environment is captive in the scope of our WAN/intranets used by our people. My server sets host a dozen or so applications and the RSLs are a big bandwidth saver here at the moment.
I'm guessing outside of this controlled environment, having the general public access to an application would be the uphill battle you have laid out. -Mark -----Original Message----- From: Alex Harui [mailto:aha...@adobe.com] Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 12:40 PM To: dev@flex.apache.org Subject: Re: Mozilla takes on Flash The concept of shared libraries is sound, but IMO, has problems in a constrained environment. I'm not sure what you mean by VC redistributable libraries, but many years ago I worked on a large app that used the Microsoft Foundation Classes as DLLs. That worked great because we still shipped apps on CDs in boxes. The size of the shared DLLs didn't matter. After that, I tried to make a utility for folks available for download over the internet. This is back when I and many people only had a 32Kbit modem connection. I couldn't trust that folks who wanted my utility already had the MFC DLLs and adding those DLLs to the download would have been a huge barrier to entry. RSLs have the same problem. If you want an app to go viral, it has to go out to a lot of people who probably don't have the RSLs you rely on. And that presents a huge negative to the first-time experience. Because AS doesn't support method overloading, it is hard to make RSLs work across versions. And in Apache, where we are releasing every two or three months, eventually your local cache of RSLs would be growing into the 100's of megabytes. Shortly before the Iphone came out, I paid a visit to a company that develops some very popular "consumer-oriented" applications. They basically said that with or without RSLs, Flex could not provide the reach to the consumers because of the download issue because some of their customers are still on dialup or slower "high-speed" connections. They were happy with their Flex apps on their intranet, but for the consumers they needed a good startup sequence like their popular desktop apps and couldn't guarantee that with Flex. I will always wonder if they had produced a SWF that everybody used and Android could run it and Iphone couldn't, would that have made a difference? -Alex
