products but failed, sorry. Sadly, Actionscript has more books written about it
than Hypertalk ever will have.
Andrew
Just recently bought Macromedia's Flash MX 2004 Pro because I wanted to create a xplat hybrid system for a client which used a full-screen flash projector for the main interface (because anti-aliased vector graphics rule) and rev for everything else (database, local / server file ops etc). Halfway through the project now..
Anyway here are my observations...
Flash has certainly come along way in its last 2 incarnations. I've used and taught flash for a number of years now and as a software engineer thought it was fun and had a lot of potential.... just the language needed to mature.. and it has, fortunately .. not as easy as our favorite xtalk/transcript but that's javascript/actionscript for ya. Classes seem more useful in a language like actionscript :)
I was also impressed by the number of new built-in & 3rd-party drop-in components. It now has datagrids / treelists etc .. of course all this is well-presented by some smick macromedia propaganda, see http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/productinfo/features/brz_tour/
now how come the runrev team can't look as slick ;-)
The development IDE is much better & having more control over your vector canvas was great (actionscript now has a draw line command!). Flash is far from perfect when trying to integrate it with anything non-macromedia (like microsoft and apple). Anyway after a few days hacking the old mchttpd stack I've ended up with my initial hybrid setup, with rev / flash happily talking semi-bidirectionally via tcp/ip. Next step is to get them talking xml and making use of the xupdate feature (anyone done this?.. I don't need it now but it could be handy in the future)
Both flash and rev still require kludges for certain platform-specific issues but these are [sometimes documented &] easily solved. There has been some talk about embedding activex controls into rev and this is certainly a good thing if you're ms-bound but I think most of us chose mc / rev because of it's xplat capabilities and this project certainly proved to me that it was only possible because rev is really good at the basic stuff and if it can keep doing that and improving then we all benefit.
regards
alex
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