Hi David,
And thank you for taking the time to answer in detail and shed some light on
these considerations about Flash's evolutions,
and targeted audience for Flex and Flash product line.
I greatly appreciate that.
I really love Flash and have been, like many others here, investing a lot in
that technology for a while now.
But i felt that that kind of blissful (though practically self interested)
euphoria that was recently spread by some Flex evangelist developpers
(outside Macromedia) was not 100 % consistent with my daily experience,
pertaining to competition and demand in the web field, anyway in our old
Europe.
Regarding Flash 8 crashing systematically (player and IDE) with context
menus, see :
http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/pipermail/flashcoders/2005-September/150188.html
I was suggested some useful workarounds, but still experienced random
crashes.
Best regards,
Eric Mauvière
Hi Eric,
Your work at geoclip has always inspired me.
Lets me try to help:
The valid assertion that "Flex is a tool for building RIAs
(Rich Internet Applications)" is gradually becoming widely
interpreted as "If you want to do 'rich' (fantastic,
impressive or professional?) things with Flash you need to
buy Flex."
No. That would be a major miscommunication. The Flash Professional
product is a major part of our strategy for creating things "rich" and
we certainly don't think everyone should but Flex. For many projects
and people Flash Professional is absolutely the best tool. For many
projects and people Flex Builder is absolutely the best tool. And for
some projects and teams the best approach would involve working with
both. At a very high level let me try to differentiate the two. This is
purposely simplifying to make the high level difference clear:
Flash Professional's design center is rich interactive content. It is
most focused at a wide audience of web developers, web designers,
multimedia professionals, videographers, animators, graphic
professionals.
The Flex product line (including the Flex Builder tool) design center is
rich internet "applications". I wouldn't use it for a web site or a
home page or a product overview. I would use it for a data rich (and UI
rich) application that is web deployed. It is most focused at a wide
audience of application developers/programmers with a background in
object oriented programming and technologies such as Java/JSP,
C#/ASP.net, client-server, and enterprise application development. The
applications it creates can indeed be graphically and UI rich, but will
usually be data rich as well. Flex applications are very small compared
and seamlessly deployed compared with client server applications or VB,
but it is not designed for creating the very lightweight interactive
content the Flash Professional tool can create.
Many teams building applications will also want to include designer(s)
using Flash that might create skins or or interactive content assets to
be used inside of Flex.
Flex applications are very small compared (usually a few hundred K) and
seamlessly deployed compared with client server applications or VB, but
it is not designed for creating the very lightweight interactive content
the Flash Professional tool can create. Eg. You can't do a 25K rich ad
or product overview in Flex. (That said, the Flex Builder tool does have
the ability to do pure AS projects that can be very small, but that
would mean forgoeing the Flex Framework iteself).
Very roughly speaking, I'd estimate that the vast majority of Flash
Professional customers will and should keep using Flash
Professional--indeed with Flash Professional 8 and Studio 8 we have just
done what I think is a fantastic release. Lets say roughly 80%. A small
percent of Flash authors frankly have never felt at home in the Flash
authoring product and will prefer a programming oriented IDE--many of
these folks already have been using 3rd party editors and just using the
Flash authoring product to compile (or an open source/third party
product). These folks might jump to Flex. Lets say roughly 5%. Lastly,
another group--say 10-20 percent--might use both depending on the
project they are building and/or the composition of the whole team for a
project. It is not our aim to confuse the Flash Professional audience
or suggest that they change tools for the vast majority of folks.
Indeed, you will see the Flash Professional team continuing to invest
heavily to advance the quality and functionality of the tool (as
hopefully we just did in Flash Professional 8).
This readers of list will of coure be very mixed, because it is not just
a "Flash" list but specifically aimed at that subset of the Flash
community that identifes as "Flashcoders" :)
Many of the people who have been fortunate enough
to be able to play with Flex since it was released are now
self-declared RIA experts, most of whom are extremely
pleasant, incredibly easy to reach and deal with others with
the utmost humility and modesty. (I am really going to miss
our Iteration 2 friends in this respect...)
The Iteration 2 folks have joined Macromedia Professional Services, but
they aren't going away. They are going to be an active part of the
community! Sure, they like Flex and they do a lot of projects for which
Flex is very well suited, but these worlds are not mutually exclusive.
I am sure that team will continue to use Flash in their projects as well
and contribute to the community. I hope we will continue to see a
community that really spans a broad array of talent from design to
programming to architecture and not see everyone go off into separate
worlds.
Actually, most Flex applications have this characteristic
compartmentalized appearance, like a 1970s living room
bookcase, with cabinets, drawers, framed photographs,
multitudes of lists and datagrids which provide a talking
point.
That is because for many people the "out of the box" look of Flex
applications is well suited to what they want. But it is not a
requirement of Flex. Indeed, in the Flex 2 product line it is far
easier to skin/stlye applications and create things that look very
different from the out of the box appearance.
I started using Flash quite a long time (almost eight years)
ago because it was fast, powerful, visually appealing and
there was no need to buy server software for 15,000 dollars
to produce dynamic maps. All you had to do was connect to a
good old database. At the time it performed miracles. These
days we have to fight through a myriad of increasingly large
and unwieldy component libraries. I have never been able to
start using V2 components because my Internet clients do not
want any files larger than 100 KB for a public-access website.
Flash Professional is still all that. Don't need to stress about Flex.
Of course, I bought Flash 8 Pro, which I use mainly as a
compiler and debugger. I have now learned that using Flash 8
IDE for compiling purposes is rather old-fashioned. I was
told I should use MTASC and, of course, Flex builder.
I think that is extreme and bad guidance for most people. Some people
will prefer this route, but it isn't the way Macromedia is designing the
products. If you truly just use Flash Professional as a compiler and do
AS only projects than yes, Flex Builder 2 might be a better choice for
you when you are ready to target the Flash 8.5 Player. But I think the
vast majority of folks benefit greatly from all of the tools in Flash
Professional.
- The first demo that I assemble for a client using Flash 8
makes all his browsers crash, although I had vigorously
assured him that Flash never crashes. I had made the mistake
of trying to impress him with contextual menus.
That should not occur. Can you reproduce this? If so, please let us
know. I am not aware of any crash bugs in the Flash Player 8 that would
cause this
- I was not immediately aware that Windows NT4 and a few
other environments were not supported.
- I shouted it from the rooftops that the Flash/JavaScript
communication was now reinforced; yet unfortunately it only
works with really up-to-date browsers. I congratulate Mike
Chambers and Christian Cantrell for their kit.
It is a great initiative but what is the status of this
investment with Macromedia? What is Macromedia's obligation
to truly consolidate this Flash integration in the browser,
also for Flash 7 and IE 5.5, etc.?
We are very committed to continuing to support and improve
Player-Browser communication. The Flash JS-AS kit that Mike and
Christian did is now open source and other folks can advance it as well.
And we added external.api to Flash Player 8 making it still easier to
manage Flash AS-JS communication.
- The speech about accessibility is very difficult to read -
you can say that again! Who is familiar with Microsoft
Active Accessibility? It is almost impossible to convince a
public client that Flash is credible in this field.
I am surprised to hear this...we have a ton of information about it on
our site, and we have significant use of Flash in government, education
and military institutions that have very strict requirements around
accesibility. It is still harder than I would like, but I don't have
trouble convinciing folks that Flash is credible in this field.
All of this makes me think that Flash 8 was released too
soon, as the creation cycle for a new version was not
complete; lots of things remain unfinished or incorrectly
finished. But I do have a lot of respect for the Macromedia
developers who have impossible constraints to resolve
(putting more and more into a little gadget that works
everywhere). However, I feel that short-term political
considerations (fending off Sparkle or Ajax, making one last
stand before being taken over by Adobe, etc.) have taken
precedence over the former shrewdness (slow but sure progress).
Actually, the Flash 8 product cycle was our longest ever. We took our
time and added a many months to the schedule to really polish the
product. So far most reports from our customers are that we did release
the most stable and solid release ever.
I hope this is helpful,
David
Macromedia
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