Andy Payne goes to Flexcamp

Andy went to FlexCamp last week and was good enough to write up his observations. He says:

"The new Flash 9 Player puts Flash squarely on par with Java (technology- wise), with a high-performance JIT VM (AVM2), a real programming language (ActionScript), and a mature tool set." (from blog.payne.org)

Yes , but, I think the biggest, biggest deal about Flash and Flex is that some huge percentage (99%?) of personal computers have a working Flash installation. This is distinctly different from the Java VM. If you are going to build a product that needs a cross platform experience and you are deciding between Java and Flash/Flex, this is a major difference.

From first hand experience this is not true for (see BlogBridge.) True, it seems like Java is more ubiquitous now on desktops than it was 2 years ago, but it's still not at the level of Flash/Flex.

Let me plug Java though at the same time:

  • It does deliver on the cross platform graphical user interface promise. 99% of our code in BlogBridge is platform independent - so "write once, run anywhere" is mostly true.

  • The majority of our testing is also platform independent. I would say that 99% of our testing and quality energy is platform agnostic. We do have the occasional windows-only or mac-only bug - often having to do with installation - so the old Java knock - "write once test everywhere" - is funny but not really true.

Finally a couple of other Flash tidbits: