21 packages, 188 classes, 20,000 lines of code
Automatic unit testing , Automatic daily builds,

Does this sound like a Flash program to you? Because it is.

Flash gets a bad rep among programmers. The programming model is very different from typical programming languages, and the uses of the technology have typically been annoying (banner adds, skip-intro splash pages). More recently, AJAX has emerged as an extremely popular way of introducing dynamic behavior into web pages. So why do we even need Flash?

The new Yahoo! maps (released just over an hour ago) is amazing. The app is very smooth and slick, and makes heavy use of yahoo yellow-pages data. It's integrated with real-time traffic info as well. The experience of dragging and dropping the map, and zooming in and out, is _nearly_ as smooth as google maps (hey for day one that is terrific. There's lots of room for optimization with this kind of code).

Yahoo! is playing the fast follower game, and playing it well (see also an earlier post on the new Yahoo! email client). And they're obviously thinking hard about using the right technology for the right job, rather than simply copying the google approach.

Alex Bosworth articulates a vision of what Flash is good for that matches what I've experienced. Specifically, Bosworth mentions video (one or two-way) / audio (one or two-way), combined with data sockets ("push" instead of "pull) making Flash a crucial component of next-generation web applications. Macromedia recognises this, and is working hard to make Flash and Javascript work and play well together.

Why don't more people think of using Flash in this way? In a word, positioning. Bosworth writes: I do think there's a very distracting red herring here, and that's Flash's rich user interface abilities. Every flash demo I've ever seen focuses on great looking shiny buttons that look like you took a slick win32 app and plopped it down in a browser window.

In a recent post, Cringly describes the Flash VM is a perfect trojan horse, a platform for getting the software that Adobe/Macromedia needs distributed out to the internet at large.

Let's say Adobe/Macromedia had some little bit of code - a VoIP client, for example -- they wanted to bring to market. Just make it part of the next version of Flash. Over the course of a few months and practically without effort, that little program would be installed and ready to go in hundreds of millions of computers. Then all Adobe would have to do is to announce it and the service could be up and running practically overnight.

Amit Ranjan (the head of Uzanto's India operations) has a great post describing the Macromedia MAX conference in Delhi (a conference I went to last year).

The conference happened mere weeks before the announced merger with Adobe. His report gives insight into the spirit of Macromedia immediately pre-merger, describing a marketing/technical team with "a swagger in their walk", feeling they have the potential to be the "Microsoft of the web". Pride goes before the fall, boys!

A new web email client (with the unfortunate name of goowy) has just hit public beta. Regular readers of jonathanboutelle.com will know that this kind of thing is right up my alley. The movement of desktop applications to the web is one of the big trends in rich internet applications right now, and email clients are leading the way (think gmail, earthlink, and oddpost).

I'm currently involved in the development of an ambitious RIA that is coded in Flash. I've brought new engineers into the project at various stages. I've found that I can get an experienced Java engineer productive developing client-side Actionscript in about 2 weeks, if the project is structured a particular way. Since real Flash uber-coders are as rare as hen's teeth, this is a serious advantage.

I drove out to Emeryville to see Mike Sundermeyer (VP of Product Design at Macromedia) give a talk about Flex at eBig (the East Bay IT Group). The talk was good: while I didn't learn much new about how to use Flex, but I definitely have more of a sense of where the product is going than I had before.

In my last post, I whipped up a very rudimentary form UI using Flash 2004 Pro. Now I'm gonna hook up the form skeleton to some ActionScript code. A zip file containing my FLA and Actionscript file is available for download here.

This post shows how to whip up a form-based application in flash. It's written for programmers, not for designers: the goal is to get the flash form layout work done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Unless you've been under a rock for the last year, you know that Macromedia has been trying to reposition flash as a tool for developing "Rich Internet Applications". A rich internet application is basically an application that runs in a browser, but has enough intelligence running on the client side so that it doesn't have to continually go back to the server to get the next screen, the way an html-based web application does.