Hey guys, I recently posted a thread on a popular widget platform site to get developer feedback. Basically, I've created a widget using Flex technology, and since I cannot get the SWF file size down to a size < 100KB I'm wondering if Flex was the wrong technology for my project. I'm not very familiar with Flash, so I don't know how small I could get the file size for a comparable solution in Flash. Below is the original thread.
--------------------------------------- I've created a widget using Adobe's Flex technology which has a SWF file size of approx. 350KB. I've optimized the widget using all the techniques I could find such as: compiler flags, not embedding assets into the SWF, dynamic loading of modules, etc. Assuming 350KB is the smallest I can get my SWF file, is this still too big to distribute as a widget? Here are two distribution strategies we are looking at: 1.) Put the widget on a majority of the pages on our website so when users come to our website they will see the widget and download it. This will be great for distribution, but currently, our website gets a good deal of traffic (Alexa top 10,000 ranking website). And, all of the pages on our website are around 60-150KB, and there is a lot of worry that a 350KB widget will weigh down the page too much and make it very slow when loading. There is also concern that adding an additional 350KB will greatly impact our bandwidth costs since many users will hit these pages. 2.) Create a "widget gallery" on our website where our users can go to grab the widget and put it on their MySpace, Facebook, etc. This will keep the rest of the pages on our website light and fast, but the distribution of the widget will get severely impacted. I want to know what other developers are doing in similar situations. Is Flex the wrong technology for creating widgets? What are some avg size SWF files that other widget developers are creating? If a 150KB page has an additional 350KB flex widget, is it going to greatly impact the loading time? Thanks in advance for your advice!
