Ramesh Loganathan's Weblog

Dion Hinchcliff highlights an important point in this Ajax Developers Journal article. That XML isnot necessary for AJAX. In fact, he goes a step further and says that XML may even be bad from a programming & performance standpoint. I dont know about the latter. But I do agree that AJAX as we know it today, is not theonly model. Where there is XML coming over HTTP, and JavaScript doing the post processing and user interactions in the client.

Some years back at Pramati we built a Flash Based Management dashboard . This was in spirit AJAX. We were getting XML over http to the browser- and then instead of JavaScript we were using Flash to provide the Rich-UI interactions with the client. This works very well.

This was built in a generic manner, with extreme flexibility in data driven reconfiguring and reconstituting the dashboard. Can define new sources of data/info, can define new structure and navigation flows in the front end (UI), and even define new layouts. So generic was the framework that it could be used evento present business data (to build a Biz App'd Executive Info Dashboard).

While AJAX was still not around at that time (early 2004), the principles of Rich Client UI, in an otherwise server centric interaction model, were fully used in this Product. (Check ut the live demo site- Online Demo- works better with IE).
(2006-02-27 23:05:48.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

gmail uses the datapack format for the data transfer which is much more packed but very un-generic data format model. me too think xml devotes too much space for the metadata.

however, its interesting to note that flash can provide that richer ui interaction. but would flash be more lightweight than a js library? and how easily can a flash object fit into a html window?

im beginning to think if using flash deprives the flexibility of the ui client look[view] + interaction[controller] on the client side. in flash both are tightly coupled, but in a js +html marriage its not so...

Posted by poorna on February 28, 2006 at 04:52 AM EST
Website: http://mindwarrior.wordpress.com #

Poorna,

Embedding a flash object into a html window is quite straight forward like embedding most other objects:

<object classid="..." codebase="..."
width="550" height="400" align="middle">
<param name="movie" value="mymovie.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<embed src="mymovie.swf" quality="high" width="550" height="400" name="mymovie" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="..." />
</object>

I think comparing the bulkiness of Flash and JS is like comparing apples and oranges.

My take is, JS is typically used in cases where we do client side validation in a HTML form or when we want to modify the HTML DOM to give the perception of dynamism or a more "Live UI". To this base feature set, XMLHttpRequest/AJAX added the power of making remote calls.

Flash on the other hand is typically used where you want to provide a UI which is not constrained by the basic HTML tags or a "Rich UI". This is not to say we can not have a Flash based form. But if we are using Flash to only mimic a HTML form it would be an overkill.

Rajiv

Posted by Rajiv (196.12.47.2) on March 02, 2006 at 11:35 PM EST #

Yes Rajiv, that is what im trying to convey, a flash might be too much of an overkill in the case if/when the same can be accomplished by html.

Posted by poorna on March 03, 2006 at 07:09 AM EST
Website: http://mindwarrior.wordpress.com #