Rich Waters

For a long time now I’ve really disliked flash and have always preached that it was “evil”. Really I guess don’t like the idea of a proprietary format that requires users to download and install a plugin to even view its content. The other large issue I have is that content within flash is not indexable, meaning its useless to search engines and therefor not very accessable.

After some pretty strong examples, I now see some very good applications for flash within web sites. Adbobe had a keynote presentation showing off Flash, Flex and their Flex - Ajax bridge which was quite impressive. They showed several cases using a small flash widgets of sorts that would interact using ajax to update html content on the page. The result was a nice interactive widget that would have been otherwise much harder to develop using html and javascript alone.

An example in a different session showed a totally different use, a 1×1 px transparant flash object was used on a page to maintain a connection between that page and the server. The result was that a change on the server could then call a javascript function on the page to update content. The example showed a simple contact manager with basic CRUD functionality that would update its content on all copies of that page whenever a change was made. They went on to talk about other applications such as in page chat and other advanced forms of collaboration right within a web page.

Tomorrow there is a session about Dojo.storage which uses flash solely for access to local storage, it was stated that up to 100k could be stored… which definitely could prove quite useful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 9:41 pm and is filed under AJAX, Flash, Javascript, The Ajax Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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