divide and conquer

[RogerV]

There is a Q&A interview article with James Gosling appearing in this
online software developer's journal:

Redmond Developer News | Powering the Windows Software Revolution
http://reddevnews.com/

Here's a link to the article:

The Original
Creator of the java programming language, James Gosling.
http://reddevnews.com/qandas/article.aspx?editorialsid=121

It's a respectful article that details some of Mr. Gosling's career
and contribution to computing. Alas, the article has a definite
vector, though, that converges on the matter of Sun's JavaFX vs.
Adobe's Flash (true to form the term Flex appears no where in the
article).

The only pull quote featured from the article is this:

"If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more
advanced stuff -- with richer interfaces, more complex network
protocols, more complex APIs -- it really falls short."
James Gosling,
Java Creator, Sun Microsystems Inc.

This article was aimed at Java developers as the article correctly
noted, amongst Java developers, James Gosling has rock star status.
Put the right tags on the article and one is sure to get it linked to
from Java-centric web sites.

It was curious to see that Mr. Gosling's responses, when asked
questions related to RIA, pretty much focused on JavaFX vs. Adobe's
RIA technology. That probably means that in the mind of Mr. Gosling,
Adobe has the RIA solution that is clearly the mind share leader and
that Silverlight is of not as much consequence for the moment. I
suppose that is flattering for Adobe.

However, for Microsoft, this is all a rather obvious tactic - assist
fomenting the splitting up of the Java programming universe between
Adobe and Sun. Then Silverlight can more easily rise to a prominent
relative position amongst RIA solution choices.

[James Ward]

Yakov Fain, Java Champion, had a nice response to this article:
http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=283

As did JD from Adobe:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2008/01/gosling_on_flas.cfm

Interesting reads.

My take. Use the right technology for the job. If you need UDP you
can't use Flash. If you need to rely on a runtime that everyone has,
Java is not for you --- yet (Consumer JRE blah blah).

-James

[Robert Casto]

I just want to add that though most everyone has the Flash
player, it is not as easy to deploy to as you would think.

I am foremost a Java developer. I was asked to do some simple
Flash AS3 work for a designer and we ended up fighting all kinds
of battles to get the code to work. AS3 only runs in Flash 9. That
means going backwards to AS2 as our customers mostly run 7
through 9. We even have some who are running 2 through 6. The
created movie file would work most of the time in Firefox but lots
of times would display nothing in IE. After about a week of making
changes we finally got things working, but not the way we want it
to look.

I was expecting a much easier target to develop to given all the
hype around how easy it is to create rich applications and deploy
them. What I found were all the same deployment problems of
other technologies. If I could get what we wanted out of AJAX, I would.

--
Robert Casto
www.robertcasto.com
casto....@gmail.com

[James Ward]

Hi Robert,

It's unfortunate that your users don't have updated versions of Flash.
I used to hear this kind of thing pretty often but now it doesn't seem
to come up much. But it certainly depends on the audience ie. you can't
expect people with green screens to have Flash Player 9.

We do publish version penetration stats which is a general analysis
(corporate and home users):
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

However I always recommend that people setup a version tracking sniffer
for their audience before they decide on Flash (or any new RIA
technology for that matter).

-James

[Robert Casto]

We do have a tracker that tells us what versions everyone is using.
I am glad that most people use version 9, but we have some holdouts
using 7 and 8. For anything older we tell users they must upgrade.

My biggest problem though was having Flash 9 behaving differently
on different browsers. This surprised me as I thought the plugin
would be pretty much the same for either platform.

[James Ward]

I've only heard of a few instances where things work differently on
Linux than on Mac and Windows. One of those is file upload which seems
to have some open bugs on Linux.

I'd encourage you to file bugs on any inconsistencies you find:
http://bugs.adobe.com/flex/

Please let me know the bug numbers so that I can follow up with
engineering.

Thanks.

-James

[Jeremy Ross]

We recently had the need to roll users back to a previous patch
release of Flash due to the garbled mp3 audio issue w/ v9.0.115.0. As
this is not a natural progression, it's probably an order of magnitude
more difficult than making sure everyone is on the latest version.
Overall I think Flash has a great record. A situation like this can
happen to anyone, however, and anyone deploying Flash-based apps
should have a plan for handling this. Admittedly, we did not.

On Jan 6, 9:26 pm, James Ward <jaw...@adobe.com> wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> It's unfortunate that your users don't have updated versions of Flash.
> I used to hear this kind of thing pretty often but now it doesn't seem
> to come up much. But it certainly depends on the audience ie. you can't
> expect people with green screens to have Flash Player 9.
>
> We do publish version penetration stats which is a general analysis

> (corporate and home users):http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penet...

> > casto.rob...@gmail.com