Flash and AJAX
December 9th, 2005, By Ovi Demetrian Jr
During the second meeting of Refresh Phoenix, a local community of designers and developers, it occurred to me that there is a noticable devide between (formerly Macromedia) Flash fans and (don’t call it) AJAX fans. While both seem to be using the technologies for similar purposes, each group sticks by their prefered method.
While it may look like AJAX is the new Flash, Flash can still do more than what AJAX has shown us so far. Jonathan Boutelle tells us what Flash is good for. Even though he includes a few things Flash doesn’t work so well with and which AJAX handles better, in the end, Flash’s features outweigh AJAX’s.
Of all the ‘online desktop’ apps popping up online, the Flash desktop is better than the AJAX desktop. And so is Flash maps compared to AJAX maps.
So then, why does AJAX appear to be leading the way for Web 2.0 applications? The answer seems to be in the development process. AJAX uses Javascript and XHTML/CSS which makes programming an application very dynamic when it comes to making code changes. Flash has the more traditional method of compiling the application, so code changes can sometimes be a little more difficult to work with.
Being primarily a designer, I prefer Flash because of its capabilities with interface design and interaction. From this perspective, there is so much more that Flash has already done than AJAX is currently even capable of doing.
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Tags: ajax, css, flash, javascript, web 2.0, web standards
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