One hate topic to the next
Well, I was going through the 600 RSS articles today and I came across a post by Tony Mobily titled: “Does anyone still develop Windows applications? Or, the programming world has gone online” Not only is the title bad grammar, it was a hate post on everything but AJAX. There are plenty of companies out in the world developing Windows applications and to say that Java and Flash are on the downturn is just plain idiotic. I would be open to debate the market share if there was an objective argument, but this dude is clearly not into any platform that you have to pay to develop in. Yea, yea, I know that you don’t have to pay to work with Flex, but it’s so much easier to just grab the FlexBuilder IDE. Anyway, Tony seemed to have an agenda against all of the major engines out there in favor of AJAX. Dont get me wrong I love AJAX like the next guy, but I am also a big proponent of Flex. I couldn’t figure out if this guy was mistaking the visual effects that are packaged into most frameworks and actual AJAX. At any rate, it was a similar post to all the many “ColdFusion is dead” and “PHP is greater than all!” posts on the web and that’s just lame.
I agree. That article is just oozing bias from every pore. No mention of AIR in terms of desktop apps. I’d say Flex was more an attempt to make internet apps more desktop-like, because that is what users expect. Sure, AJAX is great, but play with it and you have potential browser issues – can all your users see it right? Build a Flex app, and you know, providing the user has a flash player installed which let’s face it most do, that everyone will have the same experience.
Hi,
If there is a problem with the article, you can just say so or you can contact the author and let them know. It depends on how constructive you want to be, I suppose.
I am not (well, not especially) against development tools you have to pay for. I am against a platform where you basically have to pay a single company if you want to develop software on it. It’s called “vendor lock-in”. I think not seeing is is… err… let me use your own word, “idiotic”.
Other than that, we’ll talk in 10 years. We’ll see where “Flex” will be at that point.
Merc.
BlazeDS and AMFPHP being on the market make Flex free to work with if you REALLY wanted to do so. Not to mention the fact that you can use the same XML used in AJAX for Flex. Seriously, your post wasn’t objective at all it was the typical bash post on a language/platform. Don’t be sore, I have posted some bash post myself, I just disagree with yours.
Hi,
Alright, no worries at all. I wasn’t aware of BlazeDS and AMFPHP — I will look into them, they seem to be quite interesting.
I still wouldn’t use Flash because of the vendor lock-in… so I guess I am indeed biased.
Merc.