>> On Dec 16, 2008, at 9:36 PM, devenhariyani wrote: > Thanks for the advice so far. If I follow the advice not to use the > <Application> tag, *and* if I also remove all the MXML and re- write the app > to use only ActionScript do you think I can get the size down to under > 200KB? I think Flex is a great technology, but if its not the right tool for > the job I will sadly have to go to Flash.
I'm primarily a Flex developer and, of course it depends on what you want to do, but I wouldn't go for a "pure AS3" project unless it was a simple banner. 200KB is too little. A normal medium size flickr image already weights about 100KB. Even though widgets might use little area, they are often complete websites upon themselves. I did a facebook widget for Target not long ago. It was a simple widget but still it had to load data from different sources, it had to do reporting, it had to forward requests for products, it had a carousel with details info and additional images, etc... and of course, it had to do the normal things that all of these flash movies have to do: it had to load smoothly, it had instantiate it's components, it had to load and cache stuff, it had to have embedded fonts and assets, load backgrounds, etc. And it had to be ready in a very short time. All these things Flex solves already for you... you can redo them and perhaps save some bandwidth, but the cost is high: you'll loose all the architecture and debugging that the Adobe engineers (not to mention the Flex community in general) have already put into the framework, (which is made, of course, from the very same kind of actionscript that you would have to write yourself anyways to solve the very same problems.) I did that widget in full fledged Flex (+ Cairngorm + UM Extensions, etc.), it ended up "costing" like 350KB... and nobody complained, specially since we could cut down one third of the initially scoped development time and it turned out to be robust and pretty much bug free. -- gabriel montagné láscaris comneno http://rojored.com t/506.8367.6794
