Flash CS3 / AS3 + .NET

I used to be a Flash Developer. Yes, there used to be such a thing. A Flash Developer was this crazy thing that existed after Macromedia (which was an awesome if often frustrating vendor before it gobbled up by the rationalists at Adobe: which isn't a bad thing, because Macromedia were excellent at screwing you by changing the API, the language etc. at a whim) gave the market Flash MX, which came with a 'real' scripting language in the form of ActionScript 1.

This was really cool, and I built, with other great developers, some amazing stuff, which by modern standards looks pretty much like Ajax, because the only bridge between our Flash UI and the .NET web services (which were in .NET 1.0 : yes, I'm that old!) was a single XML(); object which we could do Asynch requests, and attach callbacks, and even that was pretty rudimentary.

So by modern standards, we used the Flash MX component and object model like our own DOM, and used the XML object as our XmlHttpRequest object, and basically wrote an Ajax application, except it ran in the browser.

I now hear this application is being rewritten in .NET; personally I would rewrite the thing in JavaScript, because about 90% of the code would work, but what you'd need to know is how to map the Flash MX DOM to the XHTML DOM. Not a trivial task, and considering the company's skill base they probably are better off sticking to .NET despite all the IQ/IP that went into that fairly groundbreaking application for its time.

But Flash moved on, and so did I. Flash recentered on the user experience side of things, which in some ways reorientated the application back to the designer side of things (not that it ever really left); and with AS 2 and AS 3 being VASTLY different to AS1 I wouldn't really say that I am a PRO Flash Developer like I once way.

BUT I still fire it up from time to time, check out the every widening implementation of ECMAScript that is ActionScript (this stuff looks more and more like some sort of type-safe/inferent Java with each iteration), see how the player (essentially the runtime) has improved, and how the actual Flash IDE (if you can call it that) has also moved on.

Of course ActionScript now has a ASP.NET-esque life in the land of Flex, which is in my opinion the greatest technology which will never happen in a big way; and this is sad, because Flex is quite simply the best front end you've ever seen in your life for developing web business applications. One problem though, and that is the consumption of Web Services.

Flex/Flash/AS do do web services, and they do them well on paper. I'm not a Java guy, so I can't really say how well they do Java WS, but for .NET its just not intuitive and simple, and that for me makes the whole point of WS as a way of serializing language independent methods and classes nullified.

It's simply not easy to build a flash app that consumes and uses .NET web services in a QUICK and DIRTY way. I'm going to see if that has changed, I've got Flash fired up as I write, and I hope to be focussing on Flash a lot more on this blog, as its a vital area of interest, and a real friend to me.