ARP Survey Results: My Thoughts
Aral Balkan has released the results from his survey for ARP that he posted to the ARP List and I thought that I might add some thoughts to what the survey revealed.
Mind you, 18 respondents to a survey does not make for scientific survey results, but that is not the point here. The people who responded are best audience. But I know that there are more people and companies using ARP. I just wish more people and companies using ARP. Just as I wish more people were building Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Just as I wish more clients were asking for them.
Just so that you know, ARP is a RIA Framework for Actionscript 2.0 that Mr. Balkan has provided, with the assistance of a lot of great developers, to the Flash community. Balkan has also been a great leader in the Open Source Flash movement. Roundbox Media, my employer, used ARP on three projects in 2005. It's pretty lean and mean. We started using our own little version, but there is another version, ARPX (which I can't seem to find a link to right now), that a lot of people seem to be using and we are reviewing at Roundbox.
Let me put it as frankly as I can: if you are working with a team of Flash developers, using ARP is almost as important as is getting your developers away from using the Flash IDE. Not using ARP is a waste of your client's money and your time and effort.
And if you are a developer working all by yourself, working with ARP can be just as important — if you are looking to take your Actionscript skills up to another level and draw more clients or employers into your reach. ARP will keep you organized and make bug fixes and maintenance a no-brainer.
And speaking or the Flash IDE, when asked what client-side technologies developers were using, Balkan states "The winner here is the Flash IDE. It was used in 17 out of 18 projects, usually alongside open source technologies." Although I have to agree with Balkan when he says that this proves that open source tools "compliment the Flash IDE", I honestly view this result a little differently — if it weren't for the Flash Components V2, I'd probably not use the Flash IDE anymore. In fact, Roundbox isn't interested in upgrading to Flash 8 right now and it has been out for a long time. I honestly feel that we have not been given incentive. When creating an RIA with Flash, version 8 has not given me anything that I can't seriously live without. Not to fault Macromedia — they made it quite clear that Flash 8 was going to be more creatively focused. It's just that we haven't found a client that has needed those features (o.k., maybe file upload might make us upgrade). And there are alternatives to the Flash Components V2 like ActionStep, but we have not had the time to review that project lately and it appears to still be in Alpha.
And that, too, is another point I'd like to make: keeping up with all of the options you have for creating great Flash Platform-based applications can be a huge pain. Things are always in flux. All the projects seem to be pre-Alpha or Alpha. The MTASC compiler, a product without which there would probably be no open source Flash movement, seems to be the only other truly mature project (and thank goodness for that). I mean, a lot of people responded to the survey appear to still be using Flashout, a great piece of software, albeit not open source. But we left Flashout behind when we started using the latest version of the Actionscript Development Tool (ASDT).
And now a moment of unfortunate criticism: what the heck is going on with ASDT?. Unfortunately, I do not have the skills necessary to donate properly to the ASDT project so I hate complaining about a project that I can't assist. But I must. If I can convince the powers-that-be at Roundbox, we are going to start using *gasp* the Flash Development Tool (FDT) for development of our Flash RIA projects. We compiled the latest version that is in the repository, but that version is still doesn't come close to what FDT is shipping today. Is there another version of ASDT on the way? Will ASDT turn the corner soon and have a solid 1.0 version soon? Will ASDT and FDT both support Actionscript 3.0 in the future using the recently announced free compiler from Adobe? Will it be as good as Flex Builder 2 Beta appears to be? I do not have the answers to these questions and although I'd hate it, I may soon be paying US $253.53 per seat so that my team can code as efficiently as possible.
But, again, back to the survey and one last observation: it looks like AMFPHP is being used a lot. Not too surprising, see how we are talking about a lot of open source software here, but I was a little disappointed that OpenAMF wasn't better represented —not only because I am an OpenAMF user, but because I feel that the more RIA's that have Java back-ends serving and handling data, the more support of Flash-based, and thus Flex-based, RIA's will have in the Java community. Those Java folks are very focused on AJAX!
And speaking of OpenAMF and AMFPHP, have we heard anything about future support for the new version of the Remoting protocol AMF3 which is included with the Flex 2 Beta? (What? You haven't downloaded it yet? Keep up, will ya?) I would really like to hear that someone is working on it? Heck, I'd like to hear that Adobe is going to have new Actionscript 3.0 version of Remoting Components ready when Flash 9 ships.
And speaking of AMF3 (I'm on a roll!), I absolutely love the way Coldfusion works with Flex 2. Absolutely. I can't wait to see it being used by someone who really knows how to do it right!
With all this excitement with Flash, how could anyone even consider AJAX?
Aral Balkan, thanks for the survey, thanks for ARP and I look forward to ARP 3.0!
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For the type of applications I build, and yes I'm an application builder, the new creative features Flash 8 are not really useful.
But now, all that will change. Even before they made it free (the compiler that is), I definitely planned to switch Flex 2.
http://theresidentalien.typepad.com/ginormous/2005...
I need to update it since I've added simple models and factories and integration with the zeroi logger and xray. I also worked on fling with chris allen and john grden, once you use the asset loader you'll never use movieclip loader again.
http://osflash.org/fling
I may eventually integrate fling into arpx. I'm trying to decide right now if I'm going to use cairngorm for flex or arals new arp3 and move my arpx stuff over, just worried about time/effort at this point, but cairngorm looks a bit heavy to me without having actually done much in it yet.
Happy new year and hope to meet up with you and Jesse in the new year in ATL sometime.