[thelist] Macromedia & "Rich Internet Applications"

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 14 11:52:03 CST 2003


--- Erik Mattheis <gozz at gozz.com> wrote:

> And Tom, I also think I'm correct in stating your greatest sin is 
> criticizing a technology you don't know about: something you
> ironically admit before your long criticism. 

It's not that I don't know about it, It's that I am not seeing the
benefits of RMA - and I'm not simply talking about a flash page. I'm
talking about how MM explains RMA as a technology of choice.

> ... as the only similar 
> alternative is Java Applets which come with the same problems, plus
> unique ones of their own ...

I'm not sure how you can make a statement like that. There are all
kinds of alternatives. Whats wrong with HTML?

> (Won't respond to nonsense statements like "Getting to market
> faster is  not a competitive advantage")

Why is that a nonsense statement (and BTW, you did respond to it, you
called it a nonsense statement). If we learned anything from the
dot.bomb, it was things like "Getting to market first" as competitive
advantage are fallacies. Ask Pets.com and all the other "first
movers" that are bankrupt.

> > - Increasing the Number of Successful End-User Transactions. As
> > if you couldn't do this otherwise with good design and 
> > architecture.

> From my experience this is true ... I don't have hard numbers, but
> a project I was on last summer which made a Flash version of a
> product configuration tool increased web orders from 30-40 in a 
> good month to typically over 70 a day.

That's good, but you can accomplish the same thing with more
"conventional" means as well. What in particular about the use of a
RMA made teh tool better? Was it just flash or was it indeed what MM
calls a RMA?

> > They don't easily integrate into my
> > environment if I have a staff of hand coders who don't want to
> > use MM
> > products, and we have J2EE backend folks using WebSphere or some
> > other product.

> Can these developers output their data in XML? If so, you can skip
> the MM backend and get similar results on the front-end.

But MM is talking about giving my front end developers FlashMX and
DreamweaverMX as a tool instead of what they use now. I understand
the need for FlashMX if you want to do flash, but why DW? And they
don't say much (unless I missed it) about how the MM back end
compares to others in the industry.

> > Macromedia MX helps you maximize the productivity of all your
> > developers—[...]
> 
> > Blah blah blah my tools are better than yours blah blah blah.
> > Marketing not quantifiable.


> I think you're misunderstanding what's being spoken of here: Not
> mainly 
> that the language is better The MM products have "Extentions" that 
> allow coders to make widget- type things that can be used by
> designers 
> thereby separating the work ... IE, a designer can drop something
> that a coder has made into Dreamweaver that will have the code 
> needed to make the page integrate with the backend, or include 
> appropriate JavaScript ... and similar things in Flash, like 
> inserting a graph, pie 
> chart or form that communicates with the backend.

I'm curious how well these extensions really work.. anyone? This
sounds somewhat reasonable to me in theory. In practice, I've fixed
my share of "MM widgets" as I am sure many of us have. In the end, if
they are just script building tools, well I already have access to
that in HomeSite.

I'm not sure why my designers would need to deal with any
code/widgets. I guess it depends on how each particular company
handles the design process. Often it seems to me when I get down to
coding, the design is done. The designers are on to new projects.
They may make a tweak here or there but thats it. They have no need
to be involved in coding. I'm not sold on the widget thing but I'd
like to hear from people who have actually used it in a team
environment and find out how well it really works.

> > But it loaded every time! It didn't always work right. It too
> > *too long*.
 
> Agreed, the MM site is not exactly a textbook example.

So where are the real world examples? I'd seriously like to see one.

> > The "pet store"
> > example was somewhat interesting, but nothing like that really
> > exists on the web - which seems to me so true of all these 
> > pitches. Nice demos, no real reality.

> From my experience as a single developer, you're half right here:
> three of the four so-called "Rich Internet Applications" I've been 
> in on are not on the public internet: One needs a login/pass to 
> access three: An employee task scheduling application, an 
> interface to display real-time environmental data from remote 
> locations, hierarchical display of of a huge technical 
> documentation database. And the one I mentioned above 
> that is on the public Internet has been a huge success.
> If you missed it when I posted it here before, a great example of a
> of a "Rich Internet Application" is 
> <http://www.phpforflash.com/board/>

Okay I see what they are saying here. But, I'm still waiting between
clicks, even tho the page doesn't change. It looks very nice, so
thats nice. I like it, I fail to see how its so much better than
other well done standard forums out there. It didn't seem to me to be
super fast. Some of the longer threads took some time to load, just
as I would have expected.

> ... another <http://www.miniusa.com/crm/load_mini.jsp>

Thats a cool site. To me it looks like simply a Flash site though, I
don't get why its a RMA. I still waited for various things to load at
various times. Can you explain that a bit?

> .... another <http://www.fontsforflash.com/>

Again thats a nice site. So basically we are staying on one page as
it were, and loading stuff kind of like MM said, as a desktop
application. 

I guess I understand that, I'm just wondering what the real benefits
are - since speed isn't that clear cut of a benefit and while the
designs are nice, that isn't what I call a real benefit. What about
accessibility with those sites? (I know a blind person won't drive a
Mini, but MM is touting this for the web in general). 

Thanks for your response...

Tom

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