I’m not sure I agree with your statements on the Flash player.

You mentioned that “the number of people who know Flash” could cause issues. I receive scores of resumes for Flash developers and designers, so I can’t say that the numbers reflect your statement. Also, you don’t need to know “Flash” to program in Flex – in fact, this is one of Flex’s strengths.

As a developer, when I sit down in front of the Flash MX IDE, I’m thoroughly confused: there is a timeline (which has more to do with media than code) and I can barely get a bouncing ball to work.

Alternatively, when I sit down to write something in Flex, I’m presented with an editor. I put XML tags and ActionScript in to it, and an application comes out the other end. I can think like a developer and work like a developer, and actually develop an application that looks tight and functions properly.

I also have to bring up a real world example: earlier this week, we had a Java guy on our team port an Oracle Form to Flex in less than a day. He’d never used Flex before. I’d say that’s a pretty low barrier to entry.

You mentioned underlying platform issues. As far as I know, there are no such issues in Flex, because you are sandboxed in the Flash player. And, since the Flash player contains all the functionality I would want to deliver to my clients, I would not be concerned about playing within the sandbox.

From an implementation standpoint, Flash uses the native system’s graphics engine to render the UI, but all the heavy lifting happens in the Flash VM, much like the Java VM you are referring to. I’ll quote from the Flash Platform White Paper on Macromedia’s web site:

“ActionScript is a procedural programming language that will be familiar to anyone who has worked with JavaScript. ActionScript supports object-oriented development and strong data typing of variables.

Flash Player contains a virtual machine that executes compiled ActionScript code in exactly the same way across operating systems and devices.”

I have noticed bloat and heaviness in Flash apps, but I’ve also noticed speed and elegance. Like everything else, I think it depends upon how you build your apps. We’ve developed a number of kiosk applications in house using Flash, and they perform beautifully. The heaviest part is loading the video files off the hard drive (which we could probably circumvent if we bought the Flash streaming media server).

Thanks also for the link you posted; I’ll definitely check it out and post my thoughts.

- max

You will get into cross-browser, cross platform issues when you have a lot of facilities provided by the underlying platforms. Complexity results in greater number of bugs usually. The way Flash has achieved what it has is by providing the lowest denominator of services aka a vector graphics engine with multimedia capabilities. (Contrast that with what a Java VM provides and pulls off successfully). The downside of the approach is that everything has to be built on top of the bare minimum. This results in the bloat and heaviness you notice in Flash apps. The heavy nature of Flash is intrinsic to the technology. Slowly I feel Flash will morph into what the Java VM is today. So good luck whichever way you go.

Btw, off late I am following the discussions on the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Let us see how things go there.