I’m in the trade of developing business web applications. They are mostly internal-use, sometimes with a partner zone, but rarely available to the public internet. They are applications that help companies run their business.
For some time now I have an idea bugging me – why not use Flash for them? Up to now it’s been ASP.NET + AJAX, which is not bad, but it’s still the same old HTML+JS. As a result, browser compatibility is difficult to achieve and creating a rich UI that suits the clients needs/wishes is challenging. Most of the time this results in the application supporting IE only, or at most – IE & FireFox.
Flash would solve all this. It would instantly run on all browsers and all platforms. The UI capabilities far exceed those of HTML+JS. It can be loaded by parts and can do asynchronous communication with the server. What else can you wish for?
Yet somehow I haven’t seen or heard anyone doing this. Instead, new alternatives (like Silverlight) are created which essentialy do the same thing, but still try to cling to HTML+JS. What am I missing?
It should be noted that I’ve never done any Flash development, so maybe I’m seriously overlooking something that makes this impossible.
It’s already happening? Flex!