Aha, so I am not crazy! Choose Flash for portable apps. Yahoo says so.

For as long as I have been a Flash developer, I have been completely addicted to it. And its only getting better with age. But off late, a lot of people have been eager to prophesize the death of Flash (usually siting poor Flash implementations as reasons). However there are certain features (not counting the wow effect) in Flash that make it a good choice for certain implementations. For one thing Flash Player (esp greater than 9 which 98% of the users now have) is much faster in processing data than javascript, especially on older browsers. Another reason is that a self contained swf file is a lot more portable when moving from one environment to another. In today’s world of Facebook widgets, OpenSocial containers, etc etc, deploying a swf is a lot easier than packaging a suite of javascript files. Actually a lot of those containers won’t even let you deploy JS on their servers and force you either to use an html extension like FBML or use an IFrame (and again there are limitations set on where those can appear on the sites). So it was really heartening to see that officially be posted on the Yahoo Developer Networks blog by Jonathan LeBlanc, Senior Software Engineer / Technology Evangelist from Yahoo. So do give it a read and use that as ammo if you are in another one of the “Why Flash” conversations.

The post can be found here.

Also take a look at the Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS)’s Flash SDK here (Yahoo has only released a Flash and a PHP SDK).

Go Flash !

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur