When approaching a new design of a rich content web application, the same questions always come out: which is the best framework for the purpose?
Well.. depending on your definition of “rich” and also to the complexity of the interactions within the platform that you want to built up, a few approaches exist to solve this problem. The first possible I will call it the “Javascript” approach. Thanks to the affirmed level of the Javascript technology, there are a lot of interesting libraries (such as JQuery or Dojo) that can provide the developer of a powerful toolkit for building fancy interactions and ready to go components. Especially if paired up with other strong Ajax frameworks (like Zend Framework), it can create a spicy mixture that boosts the development process. But what about the “after”? Usually independent programmers don’t care that much about the maintenance of the code… and more generally about the application development process, since the majority of software project failures are registered in the development phase.
But what if the project results successful? Code maintenance could be as much harmful as software development! In such situation I would personally have preferred to have chosen the second approach, that I will call “the Flash approach”. Nowadays flash players are installed in every PC, and a web browser without flash player support… has more than a half of the websites unavailable for its users. Flash movies are embedded everywhere (for Video streaming, Audio streaming, Slideshows…) but the power of flash movies is not only on the easy interface and interfacing power (i.e. a .swf movie can be considered as a small, fast web embedded application). A lot of programming languages have moved forward to match that standard and provide different languages to create complex flash compiled web applications . Those ones built in flash are not only fast to develop, but also to maintain. Opposing to their javascript competitors, websites built in flash (e.g. the famous French music website Deezer) take both positive aspects from website applications and standalone ones. Hence from a developer point of view, those websites are nothing more than a set of compiled applications, merged together in a light fashion to be served by the Internet community.
Just to have a taste of what is outside for the Flash development, I listed some swf generators APIs:
- Flex: obviously the mastered languages from Adobe to create flash applications, it provides an XML based language as support to the Actionscript interactions
- OpenLaszlo: a direct competitor of Flex. It provides a similar XML based syntax to build .swf web applications
- Ming: a C , C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl (yes you have understood…) library to generate SWF files
