Re: Casino switches to AIX

From: john e
New application technology platforms like Flash use the browser
simply as nothing more than a delivery mechanism for a new
proprietary application platform.

I recently checked out quite a bit of learning material and application samples that run under Flash, in order to assess where it might fit in my ideology for application development and deployment. So your comment intrigued me.

Actually my interest in Flash goes back to a privately held software company, of which I'm a shareholder, which has adopted Adobe Flex / Flash as their primary development / deployment platforms.

There seems to be a constant tug and pull between the amount and type of code folks deploy and run on clients vs. servers. Flash in some respects appears to be a Web technology, but it's really a thick client technology, deployed over the Web.

Adobe's web site hosts an interesting Flash application called the component inspector, or something like that name. It allows you to test tabs, grids, slider-bars, and other UI and data components from their Flex application development framework. The application begins with about a 250K executable (a file with an .swf extension) that runs under Flash. But every visual component you test, downloads an additional 100K-200K executable.

By the time you've reviewed their component pallete, you've incrementally downloaded several dozen megabytes of executable code to your PC. And that's just for UI elements. The whole development and deployment paradigm encourages you to manage user state, run data validation and business logic, and provide access to other applications within Flash. It's a slight variation of thick client-server computing. And my understanding is that Microsoft Silverlight is quite comparable. The pendulum swings back to deploying more code to the PC. If you runenough different applications under Flash you get the Virtual Memory Too Low message under Windows. And you download the entire code-base repeatedly whenever you clear your browser cache.

I can't help but contrast that with my preference for deploying applications under a Web portal. Applications that run under the IBM i native virtual machine, which download a minimal amount of HTML and JavaScript; just enough to provide an efficient keyboard and mouse oriented GUI. Run most of the application logic on the server.

I see a place for Flash for certain specialized needs; video playback, graphical charts, and applications that rely on visual transitions and effects, but I'd still recommend native IBM i code for database maintenance, inquiry, transaction processing, and reports.

Nathan.