Will Ajax overtake Flash in 2007? More likely, we’ll see a proliferation of web apps and sites that use a combination of Ajax and Flash, as it becomes easier to combine the two and as developers find the best way to use each. We’ll see a bit more Java too in the browser, not necessarily for user interface applets but rather for extending the browser in nontrivial ways, like Apache Derby does for persistent storage.
A good example of a hybrid Flash/Ajax website is Streampad, a music streaming service. Two examples of nonobvious but clever uses of Flash within the Ajax paradigm can be seen in Fjax for XML parsing and dojo.storage, which uses Flash for its default implementation of browser storage.
Some factors driving a hybrid model include:
- Multimedia content like video and audio is becoming ever more important as a way of engaging with users. Flash is often the right tool for that.
- Mashups that combine data, widgets, and capabilities from multiple services and sites will be most easily composed and scripted using DHTML (i.e., HTML + JavaScript).
- Flash is becoming less scary to developers committed to open standards, since Adobe donated the ActionScript engine to Mozilla.
- Flash is unlikely to generate an “it’s only for web designers” reaction from the newest generation of web developers, since they weren’t exposed to lengthy Flash intros during Web 1.0. Instead, they may be more likely to look kindly on Flash because of their devotion to video sharing.
- It’s becoming easier all the time to script Flash and Flex (Flash’s big sister) from JavaScript, mainly due to Adobe’s ongoing efforts in this area.
What tools will be important, if hybrid Ajax + Flash + Java browser apps are the future? Perhaps toolkits and frameworks that shield developers from having to know multiple languages, object models, and browser quirks, for example, OpenLaszlo, the Google Web Toolkit, and Morfik. Abstracting the web development task like that, though, introduces its own problems. That deserves its own blog post.
3 Comments
When people talk about the future success of Ajax and Flash they take it from the developer’s POV and ask questions like: is it open source, need a plugin, etc. Those questions will have very little to do with the success of either platform. It’s always about the bottom line and that’s cost of development and support.
If the ACME company wants a RMA then they probably don’t know the difference between a socket and a vector shape. They take their idea to a few different design/development firms and say, “how much and when?”
I don’t do Ajax development so I can’t say how long it might take to develop in that environment but I find it hard to imagine that it’s going to be faster than developing with Flex/Flash (Flesh). And even if they can both be developed in the same time for the same cost then there is still the question of support. From an Ajax standpoint there is always the consideration that code will have to be tweaked when new browsers are released. That won’t happen with Flesh.
So I can’t see many design houses that are married to the Flesh approach deciding to add Ajax to their skill set but I can see the Ajax crew developing some Flesh skills. It will start with video and then spill over more and more into just developing as much as possible in Flesh.
“flesh”: hadn’t heard that before. The imagery is a little odd, but okay
The bottom line of development and maintenance cost is important, but does everything come back to that? Some dev teams might be more comfortable with one or the other, so they’ll go with what they’re used to. In the short run, that would be most cost-effective but they might be missing out on lower maintenance costs later.
Thinking out loud here… developers are also going to be swayed by what they think is cool. That could go either way–those who value a rich, multimedia experience might think Flesh is cooler but those who are into open standards might lean towards Ajax.
One development that’s helping to shield developers from the quirks of individual browsers is Ajax toolkits like dojo and scriptaculous (please don’t ask me to get the periods in that name right).
I’d agree with you that design houses using Flesh probably won’t move significantly towards Ajax, but that Ajax developers will add Flesh. As you say, video is the entry point for Flesh.
Thanks for commenting.
Anne, all true and I was overstating by saying that it “all about the bottom line.” True, developers are attracted to platforms for various reasons and changing from one to another or adding another platform to your skill set is a slow process.
I was trying to comment from the perspective of a client who is shopping around for a solution. One presumes that they are not married to a particular platform - Ajax or Flesh. If one platform does have a significant advantage in dev time and/or support time then it will have a great advantage.
It’s hard to tell which platform will gain the largest slice of the pie but from everything I see the demand for dynamic websites is so great that there aren’t enough developers in either camp to fill all the orders. There’s plenty out there for everyone to do.
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