AJAX vs Flash as the standard for rich web application development.
WHAT IS AJAX?
What?! You don’t know? And you call yourself a nerd…
AJAX is short for: ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’. AJAX is a combination of technologies that have been around for years.
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- DOM
- JavaScript
- XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously.
From Wikipedia:
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications.
ARE FLASH’S DAYS NUMBERED?
With AJAX gaining mind share and the fact that it works in all the major browsers, I am wondering if Flash’s days are numbered in terms of rich web application development?
And if Flash never gains that position in the market place, will Flash become another one of marginal technologies? Think about it, who wants a Flash ‘intro’ these days?
MY POINT OF VIEW
I think that Macromedia (now Adobe,) had priced their way out of the market with the cost of Flex.
Besides that, the one big hurdle that Macromedia always faced was that to use Flash, you need to learn Flash – an environment that is alien to programmers.
… Flash’s legacy as an animation software, is still very obvious despite Macromedia’s effort to hide that in the last release of Flash MX.
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Manning Publications has provided me with a short video introduction to AJAX that is worth watching – if you’re a nerd who can understand at least a little programming.
Download the Quicktime video on AJAX (8.2 megs)
Note: you will need Quicktime 7.
September 29th, 2005 at 10:26 pm
Hi,
I think you will like “Zorn”.
Regards,
David
macromedia
September 29th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
Hi David,
What can you tell me about Zorn?
I still have soft-spot for Flash – my brother and I started using it way back when it was called ‘Future Splash’ – this is before Macromedia picked it up.
May 12th, 2006 at 4:52 am
overshadow the front-end audience needs. That’s why Flash is the tool to create graphically esthetic sites targeted on the front-end audience. Take a look at http://rr.com/flash and I would say: Ajax, eat you heart out..
November 12th, 2006 at 12:45 am
[...] 5. “Flash vs Ajax” lives. First a quick rant. This was a bit of a sales pitch from Adobe, and was more one way than you would expect at BarCamp. I’d encourage the presenter (Kevin Hoyt) to make the discussion more interactive in the spirit of BarCamp in the future. Anyhoo, it was still pretty damn interesting. This debate has been raging for a while, but it was good to get an update from one of Adobe’s own Flash specialists, Kevin Hoyt. Kevin showed a little Ajaxy web demo that grabbed 1,000 rows from a database, which took about 3 seconds to execute. Kevin talked about scaling of Ajax apps and the problem associated with the fact that in the end Javascript is handling the work. He showed the same demo using the Flex Ajax Bridge (presumably with the same back end database, etc.) which executed in about a tenth of a second. Basically, while Flash still uses the browser stack, it doesn’t have to depend on Javascript to parse and handle the resulting XML. He also showed that with 6,000 rows, the Ajax app really started to break down with browser timeouts, etc. after about 30 to 45 seconds. The Flash demo, of course, returned 20,000 records in about half a second. Cool little demo that makes it pretty clear that Flash is something to consider if scale is an issue for your Ajax app. [...]