Building a Word Processor – Ajax vs. Flash
The Virtual Ubiquity blog (they are the company behind Buzzword, the Flex word processor that you’ve probably seen) has a great post on why they chose Flash over Ajax. It does a good job of explaining the Ajax approach to building a word processor, and some of the weaknesses to that approach.
Flash won’t be the answer in every case, but the Buzzword team chose it because it suited their needs best. Even though Flash has a bad reputation for rich text, they dug into the technologies, found that Flash could do everything they wanted, and they built their word processor. It’s also interesting to hear them talk about Flash Player 9 as the first real virtual machine. In a lot of ways, they’re right. With Flash, you have a lot of power running inside the browser. But it acts just like a virtual machine, with its own rich sandbox and rich functionality.
The Virtual Ubiquity blog has become one of my favorites. They’re doing a great job talking about the development process and it’s one of the best looks at the creation of a Rich Internet Application that I’ve seen.
[tags]Virtual Ubiquity, Ajax, Flash, Flex, Buzzword[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
April 5th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
[...] Ryan Stewart – Rich Internet Application Mountaineer » Building a Word Processor – Ajax vs. Flash Ryan points to a blog about why one of the coolest apps I have seen in a long time chose Flash over AJAX. If you have not seen Buzzword yet you must check it out (tags: AJAX Flash Adobe) [...]
April 6th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
[...] Ryan Stewart – Rich Internet Application Mountaineer » Building a Word Processor – Ajax vs. Flash – The Virtual Ubiquity blog has become one of my favorites. They?re doing a great job talking about the development process and it?s one of the best looks at the creation of a Rich Internet Application that I?ve seen. [...]
October 28th, 2007 at 11:35 am
The Virtual Ubiquity blog truely is a great blog which has contributed a lot to the creation of a Rich Internet Application.
January 26th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Ryan,
Can you tell me just one thing? How do they manage to write files from Flex running inside the flash player? The “save as” function they have is great.
Thanks,
Victor