4 posts tagged “flash”

I'm testing out Pacifica, Adobe's Flash VOIP library, and I have to say, "it works as advertised", meaning the demos shown at Max and other events are true to form (I'm under NDA so I can't say much more).  With RibbitPhone, Red5, Smart Fox Server, ElectroServer, FMS and Adobe Connect, there are now quite a bit real-time possibilities with Flash serving different needs.

Add to that the new hardware acceleration additions in Flash 10 and my real-time, multi-touch dreams are coming true!  The only thing left is a built-in Flash screen codec to capture screen recordings.

When something essential is purposely flawed.  Derived from the standards body that regulates javascript/Jscript and Actionscript3, the most widely used client side programming languages on the Internet today. 

I've been asked, "What programming language should I master"?  Naive question for sure but it got me thinking about the browser as the new desktop and more specifically about client side RIAs.  A new religious war is bubbling . . . Flash or Silverlight.  Some frame it as an open source v. Microsoft battle.  However, that does not take into account the client side operating system (including Symbian here) and the server side technology.

This opens a very interesting door for the likes of Laszlo.  If they pretty themselves for a date with Google, I think they can come out on top.

Back to server side technologies.  Besides Livescript which ran on Netscape web servers, I don't know of any server based language that is ECMA compliant.  FMS doesn't count because it doesn't serve http.  What language am I missing?  Haxe really doesn't count . . . at least not yet. 

So if all the client side technology is ECMA based, is there an equivalent server side language?  If so, then ECMA would be good programming "language" to master because learning the different dialects would cover you as a newly minted CS graduate.  It would also get you a running start with Python and Java.

Having one standard to rule them all is great but if ECMA is that standard, it is inherently flawed.  A beautiful dilemma.

I'm a little late to the game but Microsoft announced the release of their CLI.  With the release of Tamarin, I sense an Adobe v. Microsoft fight which hopefully will result in the ability to compile AS3 code to a .NET compatible binary?  I'm sure the Haxe developers are all over it already.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really liking Flex2.  I enjoy coding in Flex Builder 2 (i.e. Eclipse) flipping back and forth from and to CF/PHP/Javascript/Flex2/Java/SVN perspectives, getting MXML wire frames from designers working in Fireworks CS3, using ASDoc, FlexUnit, FABridge, FlexModule, FlexAnt, extending Flex2 components (logically by extending classes and design wise by using CSS) and creating frameworks (I have one called Flapjax that I'm working on.  I really like Cairngorm but for the most part, it is a bit much . . . more on that later).  However, Flex2 components are HUGE and sometimes clunky.  The biggest offender for me is the videoDisplay component.  Just dragging the component in design view and compiling to a swf is 144KB.  Compare that with the Flash CS3 FLVPlayback component that is 52KB when compiled.  I quickly went through the component list for both Flex2 and CS3 and on average the Flex2 components are about 3 times as big and the CS3 components.  The list component is 192KB in Flex2 and only 32KB in CS3.  6x seems a bit silly, right?!  And why is an empty Flex2 application 124KB?

I was really hoping to move away from the Flash IDE completely since there isn't a robust command line compiler for FLAs which makes unit testing and automatic builds more tedious and no FLAModule for Apache/IIS (hmmm . . . maybe a new project for OSFlash?).  FL CS3 on my MBP though feels so much better though.  It looks like I can't completely jump ship to Flex Builder.  Components, Papervision3D, and the integration with Photoshop are sucking me back in.