Monday, August 11, 2008

Quotes like this make me cringe


"It's amazing what people have done with HTML, which was never intended to do rich Internet applications. And Flash was originally created for lightweight animation--literally for Mickey Mouse on the Web," said Brad Becker, who as group product manager for rich client platforms at Microsoft helps oversee Silverlight. "But these technologies were designed for something else, and people are really hacking them to do more."
This was in an article on CNET.

In my opinion, there is a big difference between how AJAX has be built on top of technologies that weren't meant for application development and how Flash was really rewritten to create a platform intended for application development. I don't consider what is being done with Flex and Flash as "hacking them to do more"


2 comments:

Unknown said...

I both agree and disagree. I think the article is misleading as Adobe has worked wonders with Flex to make the flash player a viable application platform. However, being a Flex developer coming from an application development background, there are still some hurdles to overcome on the platform. Flex definitely maintains its animation roots relying on timeline, frame-based animation in a single thread. For simple apps you'd never notice, but for larger applications you quickly become aware of this fact and have to rely on workarounds to get the performance and features user's expect. I personally love working in Flex and hope Adobe continues to evolve the framework and adds support for worker threads and other useful application framework utilities.

Unknown said...

I also think it makes me cringe. Typical MS nonsense, he will be talking about synergies next. It is however amazing how html/javascript & ajax has allowed it to do things it was never intended to do however for me thats a bit like builing a kitchen out of lego. Also for me I find dthml/ajax, faces and all that nonsense horrible to develop with. Anyway, if we are 'hacking' flash/flex to do more then at least were not building wages with a wizard....any moron can do that.