Having been one of the first people at the BBC to try to create a 'useful' (
;-) ) Flash app ( BBC New Iraq War Console / Celebdaq Interactive Console) I
came up against so many people at work saying "We can't use Flash 6!!" (back
in the day) , I said "Rubbish! Check the stats! Sniff the plugin version!!"
and then they soon found out that a MASSIVE majority of users to BBC News
Online had the version of Flash I needed (to save vast amounts of time
parsing xml etc)

So, on we went.

I think it's amusing when I see people bemoan the use of Flash for things
that sure, can be done in AJAX etc. (I have learned and used a lot of AJAX
since those early Flash days, when at the time it was the the only way you
could do certain things across platforms which were meant meant to improve
the user experience - no, really! ;) )

Trouble is, there aren't enough developers there at the beeb (in News, at
least) who can do all these things - along with all the other great stuff
they have to do.

There are some amazing developers there - don't get me wrong - some are
geniuses - some are not anything close. Some are great at Java, some are
Flash ninjas, some do great html. Some do what they're told. Some push the
boundaries.  Some 'watch the clock'. Some work as long as it takes to get a
job done because they love it! ;)  Some do that little bit 'extra'.

What can happen in editorially-driven sites like this is, when a
producer/editor wants a certain 'feature', a representative of the
design/dev team might a) say 'No! We can't do that!'  then hopefully b) Come
up with a solution / compromise which might be down to skillsets required
and resources available.

What I mean is, I expect Flash was chosen because when you have a Flash
ninja at your disposal, it's very very easy fast and cheap to implement. And
you know it's going to work across platforms. And you know it's safe - as
it's in the Flash 'vm' environment/wrapper, where doing really bad things is
pretty impossible actually.

Hopefully a Flash dev there worth his/her salt stood up and said "I can do
it!" ;)

K

ps: dont get me started on the crazy looks people gave me years ago when I
suggested I use PHP and MySql on a live project.  Save money?? God forbid!!
;) lol
pps: I *did* end up using LAMP for that project. Using an old PC which was
about to be thrown out as it was "not Millennium compliant" - I put Linux on
it - seemed OK to me ;) hehe








On 3/5/07, Andy Leighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 10:32:04PM +0000, Andy wrote:
> On 04/03/07, Gordon Joly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >Switch to Ruby on Rails and AJAX over and above Java?
>
> Ruby is server side, unless I am mistaken. Thus would not need to be
> installed locally, so a good thing there.
>
> Javascript (needed for AJAX) is implemented differently across
> browser. not even sure the XMLHTTPRequest function, or whatever it is
> called, is standardised or if websites just pray all vendors
> implemented it the same way.

Javascript is pretty standard.  XMLHTTPRequest is implemented slightly
different across platforms however it is pretty easy to write code that
wraps around the particular implementation for all the major browsers.

> I suggested Java over HTML/CSS/Javascript as Java is more versatile.
> Java will also run on many more platforms than Flash. You can even get
> embedded versions of Java. Java is a more full featured language than
> javascript, or I might just not know Javascript well enough.

I've written Java on server, client and mobile.  CDLC (the form of
Java on mobile phones) is pretty cut down compared to JavaSE - the
UI layer is completely different for example.  Also I am not sure
how good the phone browsers (or even Pocket IE on WindowsCE PDAs)
are at running java applets.

Javascript as a language is perfectly capable (although prototype
based languages have typically been less well-understood).  Some
of its poor reputation comes down to poor implementation of the DOM
and not the language at all.  Also it doesn't have a wide range
of general purpose libraries (IO and UI in particular) because it
was designed to work wihtin a hosted environment.

At the moment for most things my choice would tend to JS/CSS/HTML
for portability.  However I do appreciate that it can be a more
tricky proposal to develop to that and likely to take a little
longer than Flash.

Personally I'm looking forward to a time when all desktop browsers
have SVG/SMIL/XForms/XHTML/CSS3.

> And of course security wise Flash is a no go area. If you can't see
> what code is doing to your machine better assume its doing something
> bad to it. Of course I could run flash in a VM

Technically the Flash Player is already a VM.

If you want real issues with Adobe Flash the following are better
issues - far more optimisation for the Windows platform.  Solaris is
still languishing on Flash 7.  No 64bit version.

--
Andy Leighton => [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
-
Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group.  To unsubscribe, please
visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.  Unofficial
list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/

Reply via email to