Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
onAIR 2008 Berlin reflection
I returned from onAIR tour event in Berlin already last week, but still wanted to share a thing that stayed on my mind.
A bit to my surprise in the presentations flex and html/js/ajax seemed to be represented to higher extent than flash was. In the projects mentioned there seemed to be heavy html and flash integration. As in AIR you have different development platforms mutually integrated, you can choose the right tools for each problem. To help chose the right platform for a particular project Lee Brimelow pointed out advantages/differences of flash and flex. He noted that flash would fit best in a project where there is a need for animations, video, custom design and higher needs for performance, while flex makes more sense for projects with structured layout, data binding and component usage. He also marked coding comfort as an advantage for flex (actually referring to FlexBuilder) compared to the lousy AS editor in Flash IDE, but I would not count that in, as a lot of flash programmers are using other code editors. A good example of using the right tool was when somebody mentioned using HTMLLoader inside a flash based chat app to render and scroll text messages – Webkit, the html engine in AIR (and also Safari, by the way), renders text better that flash.
All in all I did not discover anything stunningly new, but got a better feel how AIR manages to integrate various technologies into one consistent API.
