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Andrew Trice's recent post on his very cool Flex visualization post got me thinking about using Ajax and Flash/Together. It's been possible for years, but uptake seems slow. Seems like the widget providers and video embedding sites adopted it whole heartedly, as did banner ads, but no one else is biting. So I thought I'd point a few great examples and some tools to make it easier.
Just last week MooTools added support for SWF with MooTools Swiff. Yahoo recently baked in Flash Charting into YUI which is pretty cool and a lot easier than trying to use something like SVG in the browser to achieve this.
Of course Adobe released the Flex Ajax Bridge a couple years to give a step up on plain old ExternalInterface for communicating between JavaScript and Action Script. Dave Johnson and Alexei White built a pretty cool dashboard demo with Flex Charting and the Nitobi Ajax Grid tied together with the FA Bridge a couple years ago to achieve the same thing as the YUI Charts. What's strange is there hasn't been more action here, the Flex Charting component is pretty kick ass and could be dropped into a lot of Ajax projects if it were just a bit friendlier for HTML/JavaScript folks similar to the Adobe Flash-Ajax Video component. SlideShare, YouTube for PowerPoint if you will, does a really cool Flash uploader implementation.
There are so many interesting things we can do with Ajax and Flash together such as: graphics, file upload, sound, push (sockets), offline web apps (local data objects) and video to name a few. We have much more to gain by mixing these technologies rather than debating which one is better.
Does anyone have any other really cool Ajax and Flash/Flex hybrid UIs?
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Flash / JavaScript Integration Kit - This is the only one that works for me with Opera. ExternalInterface don't.
The YUI Uploader is a recently released Flash/JS hybrid.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/uploader/
Thanks,
Nate
YUI Team, Yahoo! Inc.
Hey Nate, thanks for reminding I totally gapped on that. Thanks and keep up the good work on YUI. I hope if MSFT buys Yahoo YUI and it's Flash goodness stick around in some shape or form:)
Here's an interesting "hybrid" between Javascript/Ajax and Flash:
flXHR (flex-er) http://flxhr.flensed.com/
flXHR creates a completely API compatible drop-in replacement for the native XHR object, but powered with an automatically created and controlled invisible flash .swf, and leveraging Adobe's cross-domain security model with server opt-in control.
This makes flXHR drop-dead easy (~3 lines of simple code) to adapt into any of the major JS frameworks (Dojo, Prototype, jQuery, etc) so a website doesn't have to change any code at all but can automatically get functionality like secure cross-domain communication with flXHR.
the flash/java script kit page shows 404 error. Any other links?
That's really good news that Ajax and Flash are going to combine under one umbrella and it will bring more technological advancement in the online space. Thanks for sharing MCITP