Why Flash can't win the Web application war | Hacker News Reader

Why Flash can't win the Web application war

devcentral.f5.com

18 pointslmacvittie30 comments

As a heavy user of Flex for my start-up, I have to, heavy-heartedly, agree with the main point of this article.

Wake up Macrobe! Ajax, as loose and amorphous and crap as it is still today, is going to eat your lunch!

Flex Builder should be free and open-source and Adobe should encourage people to improve on it. They could steal much of the effort that's currently going into other RIA platforms by being more openly supportive and aggressively marketing that openness. The fact that they don't do that is simply mind-boggling.

I'm in the same position as you, and I agree.

The thing I find so puzzling about the Flex Builder pricing is the dissonance in pricing from student to company. For the pro version students pay $0, companies pay $700. I interpret '$0 for students' as 'adoption is more important than direct revenue today'. But if that is so, why charge companies $700? They also have impact on adoption. A MSFT esque 'start-up deal' would seem appropriate if they must have some direct revenue. Or better still, make the standard version free to all.

I took part in an interview with Adobe a few months back regarding Flex Builder, specifically on the topic of whether I would buy it. As I said to them then, "it's too much money". Silverlight doesn't do what I need, but if it did, I'd be seriously considering it.

Why are there so few free alternatives to Flex Builder? Is it because it's so easy to pirate that no-one has bothered?

Well, I just found Flash Develop today, which at first glance seems to be a decent IDE for Flex and AS.

http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewforum.php?f=11

Can I ask why you chose Flex over the Ajax approach? What features were only in Flex that you felt this was a better approach?

Several reasons, but the key one was that to build the kind of user experience we were aiming for, Ajax would have been a major, major, major nightmare - and probably not even possible (especially 1.5 years ago, but still today). With Flex, we got a very different set of compromises that worked out much better for the users.

actually i agree.. if you want a UI that is consistent and easy to build, flex has a few hands up over ajax...

ive been using flex builder for linux for a while... and frankly after trying out the windows (fully functional) trial version, i felt the windows version did not justify the price... sure there are a couple of superficial things the windows version has (like the design view - which is "ok")..

only gripe is the linux version is still in alpha so feel a bit jibbed and not to mention hesitant paying full price for it...

the real issue for me is they are leveraging so much of the eclipse framework to build an IDE, they should have more of an obligation to give it away for free, unlike MS (with its VS products)

Separate experience, but we chose Flex because the typographic control, while quite broken, still beats HTML/JS. I wrote a WYSIWYG editor for brochures and other printed marketing materials.

It isn't only that the tools cost money and the format is less open. If I believed that Flash were superior technology for what we're doing (a complex web app), we'd be using it. For me, the real issue is that Flash doesn't fit the web as well as Ajax. That's a big deal.

One hears frequent complaints about how awful it is to have to cobble applications out of HTML/JS/CSS and coax them into running in browsers that were never designed for that. That's true, but it begs a question: why, if it's so awful, do so many people do it? It must have huge value to justify all that effort.

There are all kinds of subtle differences between programming for the web and programming for a desktop-like environment embedded in a web browser. I think it's a mistake to assume that the latter would be better if only we could have it.

There's another way to look at this. One reason the "bad" approach often succeeds while the "good" approach fails is that what seems good is based on previous experiences that don't quite fit what's emerging. Meanwhile the "bad" approaches seem bad because they're messy and chaotic, yet they contain something important and new that is worth the messiness. This is how I look at Flash. People want to program in what they think of as the proper way to build applications. But if it comes at the cost of taking the "web" out of web apps, it's not worth it.

why are people "cobbling out applications if it is so hard?" - shame for one. I think many people feel ashamed to abandon the hard path and take the easy path. But, open standards aside (which should be the real reason), if something fits well (both as a solution and with adoption) why not?

why are people "cobbling out applications if it is so hard?" - shame for one.

Oh come on. There are a lot of smart people making Ajax apps. They can't all be doing it for a dumb reason.

actually shame is not such a dumb reason... combine that with uncertainty of the future...

if an open standard fails then people wont get too much flak for following it as it was an "open" standard..

starting following or adopting a proprietary and how are you going to explain (to who ever you have to explain) your choice of the chosen standard, when (a) open standards do take over or (b) a different proprietary standard wins the war?

dont get me wrong.. i never said smart people dont do Ajax. On the contrary you have to have lots of patience and brains to want to play around with the inconsistencies with a billion browsers. Lack of said brain cells made me take the easy way out ...

It's worth noting that Flex Builder 3 is free for students: https://freeriatools.adobe.com/flex/

a) Bit-torrent puts Flash in the hands of everyone who wants it. Abode just wants to collect when you build something great with it.

b) Adobe sells Flash for less than 60$ at my university. In fact, they sell all of the CS for that price...

I don't want to install pirated software (not only because of the danger of trojans), and I am not a student.

I agree with the principle, but Adobe's offer a free download and a 60 day trial license, so the risk of trojans can be be entirely mitigated for pirates.

Which university do you attend? At Drexel around 2001, all we got was free copies of MS Office. I feel cheated.

I use MTASC for AS2 development and haXe for AS3, both are open source and work perfectly. We've rolled out online maps in Flash for corporate clients without me ever touching the Flash IDE, never mind Flex.

Flex SDK is also free and open source, (Flex Builder is the $$$) , anyone can just download and start building Flex applications (well except the Charting components). You can also use Intellij IDE for Flex development(cheaper). We used FAME development in my previous startup and there is a big difference in development in Fame and in Flex - I prefer Flex.

For any of you working with creating "apps-in-the-browser", ExtJS is a pretty well-thought out platform.

It's a JS framework that includes many of the common widgets you find on the desktop.

Google 'ext samples' and prepare to be impressed.

I recently stumbled on it and have been aggressively rolling it out in my company.

17 external links on that one article. I'd much rather see them collected at the bottom for 'reference'.

Agreed, my first instinct was article spam.

It could also be because Adobe controls how Flash behaves in the browser. If it suddenly changes some security feature in its Flash player and release it, browsers automatically download the player (users don't really care which version of Flash player they have and usually upgrade to a latest release) and suddenly your content stops working. Fixing it won't be an easy task. You need Flash software to compile the movie and your scripts. Not so with JavaScript and any other open languages. This was one of the reasons why I moved out of Flash/ActionScript world.

pre-internet, the usual path towards success in the tech world was 1) spend a billion or two to create a monopoly, then 2) soak your customers for all you can get. examples: lotus, compuserve, aol. post-internet, it is now far easier for good ideas to triumph over companies with big piles of cash.

adobe looks to me like a company that's still trying to play by the old rules. it's amazing to me that they've lasted as long as they have.

Yup - I can remember helping to launch an ISV back in the late 80's. The idea was to specialise in DEC VMS systems. We took out a loan and purchased a Vax but could not believe how much DEC wanted for the development tools. The thing was that DEC saw us only as customers and thus expected to make a direct and positive contribution. They could not conceive of us as partners aiming to bring them more sales into the future as our systems sold to end users.

Still DEC are gone but the ISV is still trading (in new markets of course) so draw your own conclusions.

Autodesk is also still doing well. The formula for Abode, Autodesk and friends is to write an application that can't easy be duplicated in a browser, that businesses will buy for employees, and then build a barrier thought file formats and marketing to prevent other desktop software from competing.

yeah, that's a better explanation of how that model might still work today.

Pre-Internet the usual path towards success was 'spend a billion to two" dollars?

I wouldn't say spending a billion is 'usual', in fact the companies you mentioned are all very, very unusual given their huge success.

There's a 'real world' of software development that doesn't have billion/million dollar budgets and it's been around long before the Internet.

Entrepreneurs in their early 20's sometimes have a hard time realizing that the world of applications existed long before they (or the Internet) were even born.

I'd like to know who the author thinks is giving Flash a run for it's money with some evidence. Silverlight? HTML+Canvas+Ajax+JS?

(If it's possible to blast pixels on a webpage quickly enough, I'm sure we'll see frameworks popping out of the later. ExtJS doesn't use Canvas and it's very app-like.)

flash is a public document spec and Adobe allows other people to build editors and even players (which has been happening)

the .swf format is open, but the .fla format is definitely NOT open. that makes it impossible for third parties to build competitors to adobe flash cs3/cs4.

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