Monday
Dec172007
Andy Payne goes to Flexcamp
Andy went to FlexCamp last week and was good enough to write up his observations. He says:
Yes , but, I think the biggest, biggest deal about Flash and Flex is that some huge percentage (99%?) of personal computers have a working Flash installation. This is distinctly different from the Java VM. If you are going to build a product that needs a cross platform experience and you are deciding between Java and Flash/Flex, this is a major difference.
From first hand experience this is not true for (see BlogBridge.) True, it seems like Java is more ubiquitous now on desktops than it was 2 years ago, but it's still not at the level of Flash/Flex.
Let me plug Java though at the same time:
Finally a couple of other Flash tidbits:
"The new Flash 9 Player puts Flash squarely on par with Java (technology-wise), with a high-performance JIT VM (AVM2), a real programming language (ActionScript), and a mature tool set." (from blog.payne.org)
Yes , but, I think the biggest, biggest deal about Flash and Flex is that some huge percentage (99%?) of personal computers have a working Flash installation. This is distinctly different from the Java VM. If you are going to build a product that needs a cross platform experience and you are deciding between Java and Flash/Flex, this is a major difference.
From first hand experience this is not true for (see BlogBridge.) True, it seems like Java is more ubiquitous now on desktops than it was 2 years ago, but it's still not at the level of Flash/Flex.
Let me plug Java though at the same time:
- It does deliver on the cross platform graphical user interface promise. 99% of our code in BlogBridge is platform independent - so "write once, run anywhere" is mostly true.
- The majority of our testing is also platform independent. I would say that 99% of our testing and quality energy is platform agnostic. We do have the occasional windows-only or mac-only bug - often having to do with installation - so the old Java knock - "write once test everywhere" - is funny but not really true.
Finally a couple of other Flash tidbits:
- Keep an eye out for Buzzword, a really snazzy word processor, written in Flash/Flex which might be the current state of the art for web apps written on Flash/Flex.
- Did you know that Google's cool street view feature is built on Flash/Flex? In fact throughout many of your favorite web services (Google, Yahoo, etc. etc) there are snippets of Flex/Flash that are unobtrusively raising the level of user experience on the web.
- On the other hand, the iPhone still does NOT have flash, and some have speculated about Apple's strategic and tactical motivations.
Monday, December 17, 2007 at 11:00AM 
Reader Comments (3)
[...] on salas.com I’ve written a short commentary about Flex as a response to Andy Payne’s Flexcamp experience. There are some Java tidbits of interest to [...]
Flash (as a browser plugin) certainly is ubiquitous. However the AIR runtime is not. I think there's a multiway competition over what the platform for rich media internet applications will be. Will it be Flash morphed into AIR? Or will it be DHTML/AJAX in a browser? Will it be Silverlight? Will it be JavaFX? Apple is betting on DHTML/AJAX, clearly.
Thanks for your note and blog reference.
I agree 100%: the biggest deal about Flash is the ubiquity. My point was that Flash 9 added a technical capability (JIT VM, etc.) comparable to Java, to the ubiquitous platform.
I think it's also interesting how Microsoft missed this. By the time they recognized the threat of Flash, it had already gotten dominant market share.