[jdev] Jabberd2, Flash Client and terminator character...

[Sean Voisen]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Richard Dobson wrote:

> Also IMO it would be a bad idea to use Flash as an enterprise development
> platform, its not really suited to that purpose IMO and you will be limiting
> yourself using it, IMO for proper enterprise web applications you would be
> far better using Java.

Honestly, unless you are deeply familiar with Flash's capabilities and its
community, I wouldn't comment on the fact that Flash isn't suited for
enterprise development!

Take a look at Macromedia Flex. Take a look at Convoq ASAP (built entirely
with Flash) and tell me it wouldn't be great with Jabber support alongside
the other IM protocols.

Flash is entirely well-suited for the rich-client portion of enterprise
development. It is not meant to supplant Java, but rather live along-side
it as the client of choice. Where I work we are building a multi-million
dollar enterprise application for the insurance industry that is Java on
the backend with a full Flash UI in a 3-tier system that interacts with
the Java business logic using J2EE remoting.

So, to say that Flash is not suited to enterprise development is clearly
wrong.

As for Jabber/XMPP, I know for a fact that there is growing support in the
Flash community to use Flash with XMPP. A good deal of this support was
initiated either by me, with the XIFF project, or by others being inspired
by the release of Gush. So, if Flash socket support never makes it into
Jabberd2, I'd say it's a loss for both sides, and XMPP needs all the help
it can get, IMO. With the eminent release of the AOL Presence SDK for
Macromedia Central, it's only a matter of time before Flash developers
jump on the presence/IM bandwagon, and I'd hate to see it limited to AIM.

- Sean

Sean Voisen
Weblog: http://voisen.org
Flash/XMPP: http://xifflabs.com
XIFF 2.0: http://www.jabberstudio.org/projects/xiff