On May 1, 11:33 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <[email protected]> wrote: > flash "kicks HTML into last century"? > > What bullcrap.
Ah...you jumped past the context of the preceding sentence: "Flex SDK has revolutionized development of enterprise, corporate, and vertical solution Internet apps over the last 3 years." For our vertical industry software applications, we have zero interest in having Google crawl our customer's business data centers. All the things you ding Flash for just aren't as relevant as you imagine relative to its benefits. I can confidently say our customers have had more issues with their browser security and browser hacks than they've ever had with any software we've written for them running on Flash Player. All this accusation of Flash being a security threat - with our customer base it's just the plain old browser that gets them in trouble with malicious hacks. We've never had one incident yet that has stemmed from any Flash Player security issue. I oversee development over a wide variety of software applications. Some are complex apps that run on PCs written in .NET Winforms and now Presentation Manager. Theses client tier apps deal with VoIP, streaming video, card readers, OCR data acquisition, RFID detected events, vehicle movements detected by loop sensors, gate arms control, camera control, etc., etc. To put it mildly, these apps are rich in functionality for what all they have going on and the simplifications to the user that they provide for interacting with it all. We then have public facing web apps that are exposed on the Internet. These are HTML/JavaScript and Java middle-tier. Also in this camp we have dashboard analytics/business-intelligence software written with Flex. Then we have other behind the firewall software written in Flex, deployed from web servers, able to run in both browser with Flash Player or in an AIR remote sandbox. When running in AIR, these Flex web apps look like desktop apps. Actually, given the way we do our MDI, they look and behave like Mac OS X desktop apps even on Windows. All the MDI windows are in a layer so that when the app is minimized/ restored they all respond as a layer. Yet one can click through to the desktop or underlying windows of other apps. It's a very nice behavior. I've personally programmed in all these scenarios. I know what we can achieve on each technology stack and I know the economics involved with these different technology stacks. In terms of economics of development cost, the quality of the user experience, and the aesthetics of the application, our Flex RIA apps very much outshine the web development we do with HTML/JavaScript. We're now getting ready to phase over to Flex 4 and Sparc. As I've said before, HTML5 hasn't even reached parity with what we were doing 2 years ago using Flex 2 SDK. The stuff we're doing with AIR and the new capabilities we'll get with AIR 2.0 just take things to another level altogether - that browser- based software can't do at all. When we do AIR, we do it in a hybrid RIA manner. The AIR app is essentially a host to a highly modular Flex app that is deployed from the web server. The AIR host provides access to features not possible in a browser - but it's securely constrained to just one app from one well-known server of origin. So the substantial form-based aspect of our apps is server-side deployed. Therefore our support people can run the core app with just a browser (say, when traveling and using a laptop from a hotel room). Yet the primary customers will get the full rich desktop experience by running the app from the AIR host installed on their PCs. I've only been at this particular company for six years so I've seen what we had before we adopted Flex (when 2.0 was in beta) and all the way into AIR adoption. I've designed and implemented one application for the company and have done the architecture and lead the teams for two other applications (one of them being a rewrite of the company's flagship app). I'm now being tasked to start coordinating development of all our application development in terms of architecture and technology stacks. Yes, I know folks doing web development for public facing apps on the Internet think that the IT universe revolves around HTML and JavaScript. Yet in a vertical industry space of enterprise and corporate software development, it is not rewarding to try and shoe horn all software into that mold. One of my first task at this company was to rewrite a HTML/JavaScript app with a .NET WinForm replacement. The browser approach had been okay for prototyping the concept but ended up being an extremely poor choice for building the production app. Every time we look at a new development scenario, we're always able to deliver a superior solution with something other than HTML/ JavaScript. Adobe Flex SDK and AIR has revolutionized vertical corporate/ enterprise software creation. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
