Aral Balkan: The state of the art Flash platform
- Flash vs HTML - both sides' prejudices are outdated
- Aral founded and runs OSFlash.org
What is Flash?
- A platform
- A VM (Flash player), tools, servers, components, solutions etc etc
- A vibrant open source community
- People think it’s annoying intros, interstitial add etc
- But nowadays it is more likely to be Rich Internet Apps (RIAs)
Ajax? Pah!
- Flash can do what Ajax can do, but it’s been doing so since 2000 ;)
- Flash still needs a plugin, of course
- Aral thinks the browser is a plugin too, and that the OS will be where it’s at in the future
The state of the art
- K12 - the world’s first online school
- Opal SMS messaging platform
- Flash - not the app that you think of to make apps (in its timeline-based animation guise). Not maintainable or scalable.
- They wrote their own components to make Opal possible
- More options for authoring Flash now: Flex. Flexbuilder 1 is basically Dreamweaver. Flexbuilder 2 will be an Eclipse plugin :)
- Declarative UI design, like HTML. Tag soup HTML, that is Ok, it’s not that bad
- Proper architecture (ARP): business logic on the backend. Good separation of logic, structure and presentation.
- Loads of Open-source tools out there (including Eclipse). J2EE on the backend.
- They’re developing Flash apps without using the Flash IDE
- Flex is pricey though - £10,000 a licence.
- Mockup of UI was very fast using Flexbuilder’s design view
- Then switched to Eclipse to finish implentation.
- Flex - a Java servlet/tag library for making SWFs
- “a neat separation of concerns”
- Martin alert: he just said “Service Oriented Architecture” :)
- Flex looks like a good fit with our Java & Eclipse usage! Rich apps, anyone? Yes, I know Tim M was saying this a year ago, but still ;)
- Swfmill
- ASDT
- MTASC
- ARP, Cairngorm
- ActionStep, AsWing
- Red5, Laszlo
