I hate to be "Mr Advocate", but I'd suggest that you look into Laszlo.
In addition to what Keith said, creating components with Flash is much to cumbersome to develop and test with and the information on how to do so is spotty, so many folk just don't do it.
One problem that I anticipate you'll run into gathering dhml components piecemeal is the ripple effects from different programming styles affecting your over all programs structure, but that may just be paranoia on my part.
You don't get some of the things with Laszlo as you would with Flash. Like it's a different language (though similar) so you can't necessarily use your actionscript libraries, but you get a nice component model that has avoided some of the fundamental problems with Flash's components (like initialization order) and you get a nicer workflow like you would with Flex. Finally the language itself is nice.
Anyway I thought to mention it.
Whether or not to use Ajax would depend I think a lot more on what your work is like and who your audience is.
One of the folks at laszlo did a presentation (trying to be objective) comparing it with Ajax at SAM-SIG last week as a tool for RIA's. If you're thinking about the diferences you may find the slides to be interesting.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/wiki/images/b/b0/OpenLaszlo-SAMSIG-05.ppt.pdf
Good luck with all.
-Cort
On 6/29/05, Keith Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think the biggest issue is that AS 2.0 has been out for about something
like 21 months. Prior to that, only a very small handful of people were
doing RIAs in Flash. The community and the level of technology is growing
rapidly, but in terms of hardcore developers who could really sit down and
make a decent component in Flash, it's still a small world compared to other
languages that have been around much longer. The good news is that it is
growing at an incredible rate. The number of 3rd party tools and projects -
both commercial and open source - is something we've never seen before in
Flash. Give it another year or two and you'll be very pleased with what's
possible.
kp
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ] On Behalf Of Stefan Fountain
> Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 5:10 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [osflash] Flash - huge gap in available OS components
>
> I know this has probably been discussed before but I am still
> struggling with the applicability of when to use the Flash
> platform and when to use Ajax. Especially the components
> issue - and poor text handling - is driving us away from
> Flash. So we are still musing about using AJAX instead of
> Flash but Ajax doesn't feel right, for some reason. What are
> your opinions on this?
>
> I don't have extensive experience with Ajax but there seems
> more good quality OS dhtml stuff to use than Flash. (For
> example this datagrid http://www.activewidgets.com/grid/ -
> try finding that in Flash). The biggest problem for us being
> the components of flash (with the exception of the Flex
> components) being less superior to the native HTML UI objects
> and DHTML objects currently available.
>
> I know there are projects out there for developing
> components, like Actionstep.org and of course Grant Skinners
> soon-to-be-released GLIC components. However it's surprising
> to me that this is lagging so far behind and that there are
> so many more DHTML / HTML UI components than Flash - correct
> my ignorance if this is not true.
>
> Within heavily-interactive rich apps flash is still best due
> to it's good OO design (which allows for proven OO design
> patterns), good animation properties, near-perfect cross
> platform support and frameworks like ARP. Unless a good OS
> component framework arises is Flash going to remain more
> expensive to develop than Ajax?
>
> Stefan Fountain
> Eight Media
>
> BTW - the EULA for Flex doesn't allow us to use the
> components independently of the Flex product, correct? That
> would solve the component problems immediately.
>
>
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>
>
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