@Haggai if you're in town what are you doing on the last Saturday of the month? I'd like to invite you to give a small talk/presentation on Flash/AIR/Flex to interested developers.

@Albert - For convenience i'll call Flash/AIR/Flex/SIlverlight RIA for Rich Internet Applications.

What are the advantages of RIA over JavaScript? Off the top of my head these are the most obvious
  1. Audio/Video support is much better
  2. There are mechanisms for RIA to use local resources -- hard disk, camera, microsphone etc. Silverlight 4 will even allow you to use COM (provided the user authorizes it) which means essentially you can do anything with silverlight. Javascript is generally sandboxed
  3. RIAs can run without a browser at all
  4. RIAs can use lower level protocols like sockets
  5. RIAs have native printing support

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 1:23 PM, albert kamau <kamau.albert@gmail.com> wrote:
@Rad. Thanks for the heads up.  I feel your bias towards flash.silverlight and  :) I grew up with them and would not want to see them "die". I have not seen enough of silverlight around, mostly on microsoft sites, but I believe it was supposed to be an alternative to flash.

From your argument, forgetting actionscript, where does flash stand ? The issue of HTML 5 politcis, youtube has started testing embedded videos. Most updated browsers(Firefox, Safari, Opera) are coming with some if not all new features of HTML 5 support.   

On cross browser, that is true, they are all compatible but you need to download proprietary plugins which do not come with the browser.   

Which areas will flash rule over javascript in regards to web development ? 4 years ago, I would not be in this dilemma, Flash was king/queen, but now, really, in terms of reusability, mainatanance, speed, what can flash do that javascript cant do better ? BTW, am not endorsing javascript, I spend most of my free time trying to make cartoons with flash!! This is for educational purposes only



Kind regards
Albert Kamau
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On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Rad! <conradakunga@gmail.com> wrote:
A couple of corrections

It's not accurate to say flash/silverlight vs javascript because you can build silverlight applications in a number of languages including javascript.

Silverlight and Flash are also cross platform so you cannot say that javascript is advantaged over them in terms of being cross platform.

Silverlight fully supports SEO.

I would not say that flash/silverlight is dead, even if HTML5 ever comes out of the political morass it is stuck in. Both have areas where they will excel over the other

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:26 PM, albert kamau <kamau.albert@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Skunks/ettes,

Need a bit of advice .

My cousin came to me and told me he needed to add a new tool to his arsenal . She was torn between flash/silverlight and javascript.  

We visited quite a few sites and noted developers could achieve similar experiences that were traditionally done with flash using javascript . Javascript has the additional advantage over flash in terms of accessibility, Search engine friendliness, speed, Cross browser compatibility. The only downside we found with javascript was scripts turned off. 

A flash banner that would take hours tweening, importing, exporting can be done in minutes with javascripts jquery. The only usage of flash I can see in the near future is making games and an intermediate javascript developer should be able create a decent javascript game

Given that, Apple is not longer supporting flash in some of its latest products(iPhone, iPad) and HTML 5 which allows embedding of videos, which was the domain of flash, are the days of flash numbered ? 




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