[jboss-user] [JBoss Seam] - Re: Seam and Adobe Flex

[livenow]

Hi,

I've been working with Flash since 5.0 and building quite a few Apps (e-Learning, CRM, Transport&Logistics etc.) on it. 

The approaches used by Flex and OpenLazlo have been around some time now and on the first look it seems to be a great idea using them for RIA but there are also some downsides which you should consider first:

- target audience: 
if the target audience, especially the clients (OS, Hardware) involved, is not known by you, there is a good chance to run into the following problems:

*Plugin not installed, not allowed (e.g. large companies, public sector, industry)
*Crashing/Hanging Webbrowser: Flash is not canny - you pay for the user-experience in means of ram, cpu -> be aware that the gc is quite lazy and after heavily usage of Flash-Apps mem-usage is running high -> problems started at ~150mb mem and 1 hour intensiv usage.

- compatibility:
if its truly RIA you are heading for then you'll have some sort of desktop-style apps, not just small widgets embedded in plain html which leads to the following difficulties:

*no HTML in flash: don't try rendering iframes via dhtml on top of flash-objects in the circumstance that you have to display html content somewhere. so you have to stick to flash and forget about html. Sure, some things from html work - e.g. font tags, but many things won't work

*same with active-x controls of course

- authoring: 
be aware that its quite painfull planning some sort of CMS within your RIA.

- text-legibility: 
because flash is vector based several fonts and font-sizes are really hard to read - so its simpler to stick to the system font which makes it not so fancy again.

- accessibility:
text-2-speech readers have major problems with flash. So if you are developing for .gov or .org you should inform yourself about the legislation of your customers country.

- bugs:
because of their development process in quite a short period of time (as1, as2, as3) every version has certain bugs that you'll have to work around.


bottom line:
- flash is great for multimedia-based content in specific target groups on predefined and confined specs.

the more your app should be able to grow, the broader the target audience and tasks your app has to fullfill the more you'll doubt your initial decision 

cheers,

livenow

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