The recent trend to create rich internet applications with AJAX has put preasure on Macromedia and it’s Flash technology. Products like Backpack, Writely, etc. make heavy use of Javascript and and XML. They interaction allows for dynamically adding items, drag-drop, even searches like “Windows Live Search” are done using AJAX.
Adam Pasztory has a comparison chart and discusses the different functionalities of AJAX vs Flash. Jonathan Boutelle also highlight some interessting points. One of his arguments “Integration with multimedia” is the one I think will have the biggest impact for still some more time.
If you want to create multimedia websites, using video and audio, you are better off using Flash. It gives you all the tools you need, especially if you use Macromedia Studio, it has image editing, animation, etc. to create the content of the Flash and then you plug it together. That’s very nice.
On the other hand if you create information or task orientent applications AJAX is currently the technology to use. It makes development easy, has nice interaction features and doesn’t need a lot of data to be downloaded in advance.
My point here is that I think you have to decide on the domain you develp for. Is it entertainment use Flash, is it appliaction use AJAX. This is indeed a black/white separation and developers of both sides will say they can do the other stuff also. But I think you should do what the technology is made for.
I’m not so sure. The recently-rehabilitated XmlHttpRequest makes text refreshes easier than other JavaScript techniques. This adds to the longtime browser ability to do IMG-refreshes. The range of abilities is less than with a predictable universal browser extension — people are now combining Ajax+Flash for server push, greater local storage, communications, more — and the development, testing, and maintainence costs still seem higher with the varying browser engines too. If you can do a job quickly with the browser scripting engines, sure, go for it, but the adoption rates signify that they’d never catch up in deployed capabilities.
I’m also still curious what percentage of the viewing public has “any modern browser”… it would be good to quantify how many people such an approach cannot readily serve.
jd/adobe
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