Some Flash bait...

General Discussions
#1

Hi Guys,

Recently Sun Java2D/Swing engineer Chet Haase jumped ship and joined the flash/flex/air team of Adobe. While this is pretty sad, you should see what he is able to do in flash:

This blog entry shows a screenshot of a rudimentary vector graphics drawing program with a really nice user interface. The funny thing is, the picture is not a screenshot! It’s a flash app that I could just start drawing into!

Apparently he made it within about an hour! So there’s two amazing things:

  1. something good-looking like that was loaded on the page so fast and seemless that I didn’t know that it was a program rather than an image
  2. it was made in about an hour.

I’m not saying I’m going to switch to flash - I really don’t like the way the code looks and I’m sure there’s so many things that it doesn’t have. But it would be great if java applets worked similarly (I haven’t tried it properly yet, but ken russell’s plugin 2 fixes this) and we had the same tools as flash to make things so quickly.

#2

It’s cool but not all that technical - you can’t resize, edit or whatever, it’s just throwing shapes into the scene. There’s also the dreaded no-right-click syndrome!

I totally agree with you about flash-style loading though. It’s a real bummer in java (though DzzD did some good work in that area…)

#3

kind of off topic but what i would really like from java is a core library with less crap (swing, imageio, java2d, nio, io…) and a decent applet plugin that didnt take 12 years to produce. im wondering if im the only one who is starting to think Java language good (well 1.4 at least) and Sun bad, i know thats simplistic but :-\

#4

Okay, maybe I’d need like 2 hours to make an applet like that in java. :stuck_out_tongue:

I still think flash has the edge over java for relatively simple applets, but java has the edge over flash for… well, everything else, really.

I feel Sun has recently made some great progress in the desktop user experience, enough to make me still confident enough to keep using java for desktop/game stuff, knowing I can do stuff in java that’s simply impossible to do in flash in the foreseeable future.
If you create java games, just don’t create the kind of games that are better being done in flash :slight_smile:

Kind of weird timing to start thinking things like that while the problems you have with java are finally being solved, don’t you think? :slight_smile:

#5

Flash have always been more graphics as it is more designer oriented, and it seems that graphist “shun” Java as it is a real programming language…

Java & Flash cannot really be compared, A Java IDE or a studio enabling making Java Applet could be compared to Flash but I dont think we can compare Java & Flash.

Also, all that can be done in Flash can be done in Java but all that can be done in Java cannot be done in flash.

In another hand every body can use flash even without any programming experience as using any simple soft as MS Paint :slight_smile: and do pretty cool stuff, that’s why graphist like it, they dont want to bother with efficiency or programming to better concentrate on the graphic part. but once again they cant be compared, it is like comparing access vs c++.

#6

Agreed, but OTOH one could also argue that they can in fact be compared:

  • java applets were used for exactly the same things as flash applets (before java lost that competition)
  • both run on a VM
  • both platform independent

However, both have evolved in different ways. Java as general purpose high performance software platform (with a focus on the server side of things), flash as an artist-friendly applet environment.
It’s no wonder things are the way they are now, really, and I don’t think it’s such a bad thing either.

#7

Like what?

#8

opengl accelerated games/applications?
signed access to local file system?
much better performance in computational intense applications?

#9

Right click.

#10

-drag and drop between OS and app
-fullscreen mode/detachable non-browser windows
-stand alone option
-whole JDK with concurrency and more to play with!

#11

like that: http://dzzd.net/demo/PANORAMA/PANO3/

EDIT:
wrong answer, flash can do it very well : http://www.animatif.com/panos/valence/port_eperviere_flashVR.htm
maybe that http://dzzd.net/demo/FPSDEMO01/indexSmall.htm

or to make things simple, some flash player are written in Java, there is no Java player written in flash :slight_smile:

#12

Flash 8.0 costs £400, Java 1.6 costs £0