Macromedia Flash(Adobe lately).. You hear about it every now and then. It has lately become a synonym for annoying advertisements, banners, intros and all kind of popups. Being a Flash enthusiast for the past 2 years and now a dedicated developer of E-Learning solutions in Flash Professional 8 I Know that there is much more to it than the above mentioned instances.
Flash has been growing since mid 90s. Now flash player is present in 98% PCs across the globe. Moreover it displays the contents the same way be it IE or Firefox or Opera or Netscape or Thunderbird. It has come a long way from a vector animation tool to a rich, responsive, scalable and reliable methodolgy for client tire development in enterprise application development. What more - the Object Oriented Development methodology available for Action Script- an ECMAScript Language like javascript, jscript - used in Flash 8 helps developers to distribute and adapt there works easily.
For an example of a full fledged development using Flash go to
https://.goowy.com/index.aspx.
Register yourself and start using it.. It will just take a few minutes to complete the formalities.
I know that from an average Indian user point of view it is a bit expensive to browse a site fully developed in flash. But with the advent of broad band it will be much faster to browse a flash site.
Many of you guys must have heard about Ajax(Asynchronous Java Script) which is used to develop GMail. The intention is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. ie webapplications start to behave as though it is a desktop application installed in your PC. The same responsivenes can be provided by Flash applications and moreover transition from page to page can be as smooth as a breeze(provided u have a broadband connection).
The other capabilities of Flash are integrated file upload and download, multimedia capabilities like MP3 and video streaming and crossdomain xml file which enables secure communication between client-server across domain boundaries. Flash has a local connection object providing flash to flash communication between multiple flash applications across browser and domain boundaries.
And I am sure that the vibrant and dynamic flash community is definitely going to take it a long way...