[COLUG] What good uses for Flash are there?

[tom hanlon]

On Monday, June 14, 2004, at 09:42  AM, Jim wrote:

> What good uses for Flash are there?
>
>

I agree that most uses of flash are for junk. But then again most uses 
of html is junk, as is most uses of gif/jpg/mov/wmp/mp3 .

Good use of flash:

*note*
This is not a commercial for Flash. I do not use Flash. I own a copy of 
Dreamweaver MX and have explored the use  of Flash. The proprietary 
nature of Flash and the market share that it has gives me evil visions 
of MS office and the control of the Desktop, YUCK !!. I do not want the 
web to become proprietary. With that said there are some good uses.

Hiding the limitations of http.
http is stateless so a complicated web application involves a lot of 
back and forth requests to the browser. A complicated app can "break" 
the browsers "back" button or multiple clicks on the reload button can 
lead to multiple requests that have unintended results, multiple orders 
or entries in a DB. The flash player can allow for multiple requests to 
the server to occur in the background. One instance of the player 
running in one web page request and multiple updates of data or 
requests for data happening in the background.

Overcoming the limitations of html.
html forms allow for user input. Contextual menus would be nice. A 
nested drop down box is easier in flash than it is in html. Populating 
nested or related form elements such as select boxes and radio buttons 
from a data array is easier in flash than in html.

XML manipulation.
I did not get too far in my flash xml application but it seemed like 
there was potential to do some stuff that would otherwise be difficult 
in html/css/javascript. Such as loading an xml file into the flash 
player, allowing multiple edits and then uploading at the end of the 
edit process.

Getting paid more $$.
Perhaps not a "better use" per se but sometimes the market drives us to 
do things that we do not particular enjoy or agree with. Flash is one 
of those examples. Windows is the other one. Flash has some popularity 
and the price for php/mysql/html experts is declining. Having Flash 
expertise can help a computer nerd pay some bills.

Overcoming browser incompatibilities.
Different browsers behave differently. I keep 2 or 3 browsers available 
on my Macintosh so that I can see "broken" websites in a "non-broken" 
state. The flash player claims to have 90% market penetration and a 
flash app runs the same on all platforms, linux, MS, MAC etc.

Interactive content:
I took an online diversity awareness training class that was written in 
Flash. An equivalent application in html would be difficult to 
generate. Basically I viewed some video, answered some questions, 
verified my identity and took a quiz. The Flash player allowed for 
control of this process and simplified the creation of it and the use 
of it. If someone asked me to build an equivalent application I would 
be hard pressed to recommend a javascript/css or other solution because 
it would be more costly to implement.

Options:
Sure some of this stuff can be done with Javascript, CSS, layers, and 
the like. The javascript/css solution can be time consuming to code and 
once again browser compatibility issues will arise. Please do not let 
this thread lead into a javascript/CSS vs Flash flame war. Doing this 
stuff in Javascript/CSS is hard work, giving your soul to a proprietary 
tool can be an equally hard choice. Make your own decisions. Please 
post information and not opinions. Some libraries do exist to help with 
the open source javascript/php solutions for nested dropdown menues, 
phpclasses.org has some.

Solutions:
The open source community should perhaps develop a browser plugin that 
is free and open and that solves the same problems that Flash solves. 
Flash can have the goofy annoying animation market as far as I am 
concerned but something like a hidden app that can retrieve http 
requests in the background and make the results available to javascript 
in the foreground would be very nice. A good pdf style form plugin that 
allows for context based menus would be nice. A "state manager" tool 
that allows for submitions to happen in the background or for storage 
of information until the end of the transaction would be nice. Anything 
that hides that annoying and constant back-and-forth between the 
browser and the server.

Tom