Okay so that was a bit dramatic, AJAX (or the technologies that comprise the term) isn't doing anything to me, but isn't it interesting how people confuse the technology with the use of the technology? Like, "Flash is bad, cause of all the banners", or "Flash is bad cause I hate intros". First let me start by saying I am a 'Flash guy'... I like Flash... I believe Flash is the future of the web... I believe Flash offers more possibilities than any other technology... and no, I do not work for Macromedia...

...if any of this offends you, you may want to stop here... move on to another website...cause chances are you won't like this rant...

Seems like every company out there is looking into enhancing their web experience using RIA's. For a while there, it was basically a decision between Flash Remoting, Flex or Laszlo. Then along comes Google Maps, stirring up the whole "let’s just use JavaScript" discussions. Now let me say I think what Google has done is nothing less then phenomenal. They have taken an 8 year old technology stitched together with JavaScript, HTML, CSS to display a very, very, nice app. And that's great for Google and their $300/share, they had the money to build, test, retest, build, retest, and so on, until they perfected their product. But do the mass of companies have the budget and time to build different versions, spend months testing/hacking/retesting to try and build an app that hopefully reaches enough viewers to justify the time and expense? (granted not a lot of companies seem to be swallowing the whole $15k/server Flex pill either)

There now seems to be a lot of companies taking their focus away from Flash/Flex/Laszlo to build an AJAX version as well so they can see which is harder/faster/more rich/cheaper each version is. Now I don't have a problem with a company doing their due diligence to decide on the right technology, and I will even go so far as to say that I'm sure an AJAX solution will do what they want (functionality speaking of course) to meet the minimum specs on the app. The problem I have however (besides the obious issue of speed to market) is a popular reason behind the push to AJAX... they don't want to be tied to a vendor, they want to remain open source. To me that is such a naive way to look at a solution. I mean is relying on Macromedia/Adobe and the Flash technology, a supported technology by a large public company with a large investment in its success, really such a bad thing? Is staying open source worth the abundance of additional effort, bloated code, excessive testing and code rewrite, resulting in less maintainable code?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.