- Flash vs HTML - both sides’ prejudices are outdated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
Cool tools
* Swfmill
* ASDT
* MTASC
* ARP, Cairngorm
* ActionStep, AsWing
* Red5, Laszlo