Pete Freitag linked to this article; JD has some coverage here, and Leo Bergman echoes my vendor independence contentions.
I thought it was well written and agreed with what Alexei White said in regards to why AJAX is more hyped and talked about than Flex/Flash… well agreed if he had wrote that 12 months ago; the skillset argument doesn’t hold water anymore. I’ve always been frustrated that developers talk more about AJAX this past year vs. Flex & Flash when we do some many things better, and have been for a lot longer.
Is Flash hard for developers to learn and utilize? Damn straight, that’s why I was employable for so long. It’s also one of the many reasons Macromedia made Flex and removed that barrier. According to his article, we now just have to fight off “Vendor Independance”… but… I like Macromedia!
The vendor lock-in argument never made any sense to me. I think Patrick Mineault is very talented, and has done an extremely fantastic job with AMFPHP, an open-source alternative to Flash Remoting for PHP. He goes on vacation, or gets p@wned by border patrol again while I’m in the middle of a project, I still have the “email list” to help me through my project, right? And can we all be sure he won’t repeat the history of AMFPHP, and let it languish for another 6 months…? In all fairness, Patrick learned his lesson with BP, and is always improving AMFPHP and asking for the community’s input, so my example isn’t true of what he is truly about, or what AMFPHP is, was, or will potentially be. I’m just using him as an example of an open-source project I know of.
Still, no thanks. Paying someone to build, maintain, and improve on a technology that works seems perfectly logical to me, and my skillset doesn’t suffer merely because I use Flex vs. Tapestry to develop web applications. I must not understand what vendor lock-in is. I use AMFPHP because it works, I like using it, and I need it for work and side projects. That’s it.
However, the greatness of blogs shows through, and the comments in Alexei’s post nip at the veridity of it, and help give some corroboration as well as counter-points. David Mendels from Macromedia quickly corrects the skillset misnomer.
Additionally, his blog is aptly titled “AJAX Info”, where mine is all about Flex and Flash so we’re both subjective. Furthermore, I’m somewhat of a technology bigot because while Macromedia has been cool publicly about saying “It’s not AJAX vs. Flash, but AJAX and Flash”, I’m like so not down with that.
I really don’t understand what AJAX is appropriate for technically, and if someone says “This is an appropriate usage right here… now will you code in AJAX?”
I’d reply, “Nope, I’ll just go find someone to pay me to code in Flex on some other project.”
Regardless, I like reading articles that attempt to compare and contrast technologies, cutting through hype, ecspecially when those articles are written by someone in another area of technology than I am. Specially blog posts since you can get greater context reading the comments which are not deleted because they oppose the writer’s view(s); well done.
In conclusion, I still think one thing programmers never mention is that our stuff, Flex & Flash, has the opportunity to look better, more customized, and true to a company’s brand. Although my wife’s awesome with a DIV, I can own with a MovieClip.