Flash and Web 2.0

Mike Chambers from Macromedia posted on his blog about what Web 2.0 is and how the Flash platform relates to it. Having spent the better part of the last six months building a substantial application with Flash which, as a by-product, has produced the ActionStep open-source component framework and using the MTASC compiler for building swfs from ActionScript, I will say that Flash is far better suited to building applications that feel like desktop apps, but that operate in a distributed manner. If Web 2.0 is "the Web as a platform" as Mike says, then Flash should be seriously evaluated for projects that are trying to build applications for that platform. If you want to just use HTML and AJAX, that's fine, but for us Flash is a must...and when you see our applications you will understand why.

Comments

[AnonyMonk]

The problem of standardizing the web on flash is threefold - It's not n open standard, nor is it freely reimplementable, it cuts blind users out of the web, and lastly it is nearly impossible to spider efficiently. It also precludes any sort of semantic web.

[Richard Kilmer]

Flash is capable of accessibility features. AJAX can cause some craziness in that regard as well. Accessibility is something that developers need to be conscious of in their designs, regardless of the platform. The Flash player is not an open standard, nor it the Win32 API, although many use it. The language to develop in to target that runtime, however, is based on an open standard (ECMAScript) and because of that there are open-source tools like MTASC that allow building applications for the Flash player. Whereas Flash is not easy to spider, the services that Flash connects to could be. I see Flash as a rendering and interaction technology, not something to be spidered. As for the Semantic Web...if you are speaking of the Ontological Web Language, I don't see how that relates to the client rendering and interaction side. Again, Flash can interact with HTTP-based XML-driven services which could speak OWL, SOAP, XML-RPC, etc etc. To me the Semantic Web is about what the service speak not (yet) the rendering/interaction part of the picture.

[AnonyMonk]

I can see what you're saying, using flash apps merely as the user-interaction layer of a more advanced XML information framework. It still seems dangerous to tie the future of the Web to a single vendor (especially now that that vendor is Adobe Media) with murky licensing. Paranoia aside, I'm sure your interfaces are very slick.

[AnonyMouse]

While I share some of the same paranoias that AnonyMonk mentions, I am at the same time also looking forward to seeing ActionStep in action. It sounds exceedingly cool. Will you have an example site that uses ActionStep up anytime soon (or is there one already?) and when might we see a tutorial on using ActionStep with Rails?

Also, have you considered allowing for other backends for ActionStep besides Flash? SVG comes to mind, any idea if it would be up to the task?

[Chad Fowler]

AnonyMonk, _including_ flash as a UI technology for the next breed of web apps isn't the same as what you imply when you say "tying the future of the Web to a single vendor". Rich says, "Flash should be seriously evaluated for projects that are trying to build applications for that platform".

[David]

I'm really interested in this projet... I'd like to know what is happening with it, there doesn't seem to be much progress. Do you have anything planned regarding ActinStep on Rails? Also, I like to read your thoughts on sofware development. Do you plan to start bloging again soon?

thanks

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