AJAX vs Flash.. why the debate??

An article by Pratik Gautam    1 Comment

Web developers, animators, as well as power users of the internet (looks like it’s a significant part of the world population now) know what I’m talking about.

Flash’s biggest strengths are its versatility and ease of use, and its support for virtually all kinds of media. It is quite easy to create quite complicated GUIs and animations in Flash, which in most part is because of its robust IDE. Advances in ActionScript , added html and css support, and support for a wide range of audio, video, image, ebook and all kinds of media formats, have been milestones in Flash’s progress. And all this with its ever-present development tools and ‘developer-friendly’ environment, still ensure its place as the favorite development tool for online media, applications and games. Though its downside has always been its similarity to a Java applet, while not so powerful, and adds to that it’s not free while Java is. New features added in social networking sites like Facebook (new features for IMs, ticker, timeline, you know the stuff), and Google’s use of AJAX technology in Google maps, Google+ and Gmail, Google search, virtually everything that’s Google, are to name but a few places where AJAX has finally found its use. And this has started the JavaScript vs. Flash debate all over again. And it has gained a lot of fame among us non-developers and casual internet users.

Though AJAX technology is nothing new, its use in UI development had been limited up until recent times. Asynchronous client-server communication was always possible using JavaScript and it was always possible using Flash’s Actionscript. In fact, Asynchronous Flash and XML is more AJAX than AJAX itself. This can be said because it relies exclusively on XML for data exchange while AJAX calls can send and receive any kind of data, be that XML, HTML, JSON object, or simply a string. AJAX technology is the backbone for sites like Facebook and Google books, it doesn’t have much use in video streaming though, at least not until browsers have full support for html5 audio and video.

Javascript has lesser use in animation, and unless IDEs are developed for creating vectors and animations directly on the html canvas, a facility which Flash can brag about, Javascript doesn’t have much use in animation. Besides, Flash was originally built for creating animations, and it comes with a lot of features to facilitate this and is backed by a HUGE community of Flash animators, while the html5 canvas is still in its primitive stages. Still some pretty cool stuff [lots of them here] can be done on the canvas. And when it comes to online games, Flash has the graphics, Flash has the timeline, and scripts can be directly attached to these. And add to that Flash has everything that Javascript has, including XML exchange.

AJAX technology does make social networking sites more user friendly and a lot more fun to use. It’s more of a necessity for news sites, online shopping, micro-blogging and even e-mail services.  And it has an even bigger role in applications like this online wordprocessor and this image gallery, the same kind that Facebook uses. But when it comes to the complex stuff like games and animations, Flash is still the better option. Not because it can’t be done with Javascript+html+css, it was always possible to do Flash without Flash, just like AJAX can be done without Javascript , but because Flash makes it a lot easier..a lot lot easier. These two don’t need to be mutually exclusive though. Both these technologies have been used together. Each has its own uses and each has its own limitations.