Use of Flash for rich web applications
Flash is ubiquitous meaning it is widely used and survey tells 97.7% of the internet users can experience flash content without the need to install it explicitly. Adobe’s Flex is a major hit in providing UI rich web applications. The server side Flex code ultimately gets translated to a Flash playable content which helps in using all the advantages of Flash on the client end. The closest competitor to the commercial Flex software is the open source tool OpenLaszlo. OpenLaszlo operates the same way as Flex, by using XML and JavaScript and it is converted to a Flash application on the client. One advantage with Laszlo is that the remaining 2.3% of non-flash users could still use the application because Laszlo can intelligently work by converting the application to a DHTML page if flash is not available. Now you might have a question then why is Laszlo not heard so much? Well there could be only two reasons, one the complexity to develop and maintain it and the other would be that AJAX picked up at the right time. But the attention has started to focus on using Flash effectively with AJAX. Let us look at how, tomorrow.
