Michaelwagner wrote:
I was explaining why I have a knee-jerk reaction to Flash, and why I
have a hard time considering it a real development environment.
Your reaction is understandable, but you might just as well denigrate
HTML, Photoshop or the printing press. They're just authoring tools.
Up until more recent versions the Flash tools consisted of two pieces:
Flash Studio and Flash Player.
The Flash Studio product was built for designers. It has basic 2D
vector drawing tools and a timeline based animation scheme. It does
support scripting, and you can build application UI in it, but that's
not really what it was optimized for.
And, yes, many crimes against eyeballs were committed. Though I've also
seen some very impressive work built in that tool. Kvetch if you must,
but all of that is yesterday's news. In my mind, the technology has
found a purpose.
Things progressed, and the ability to script the player became more
impressive. The makers added functions to support data interchange with
a server. Server components and methods were developed to ease that side
of the development task.
After some time, the makers seemed to realize that these application UI
capabilities would be much more valuable than the animation
capabilities. Macromedia/Adobe built out their set of tools, server
frameworks and player with this in mind. Along came a new IDE based on
the Eclipse project that is most definitely a "real development
environment". And a second generation of server tools. All of these
pieces together constitute the technology being marketing as "Flex".
Flex's capabilities comprise a pretty complex story. MM/Adobe are
making a noble attempt to explain it, but I'm not sure they've hit their
stride yet. A lot of the information they're putting out is either
strategic/marketing or technical nuts and bolts. But it won't be too
long before some really great work is done with this tool. Developers
will start wondering "how did they do that" and get interested.
OpenLazslo is an open source equivalent set of tools and equally exciting.
Personally, I can't wait to see what people do with these tools. Myself
included. And who knows, it may provide a basis for a better SS.
Yip!
--rt
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