Comments on: Silverlight: Microsoft’s multi-language Flash alternative

By: Sam Feltus

Sam Feltus — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:07:45 +0000

It’s definitely a workable technique, and probably dangerous in the hands of experienced coders.

I assume that Silverlight has similar capabilities to Flash, but am ignorant of the .NET platform.

By: tazzzzz

tazzzzz — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:00:49 +0000

Ahh, I see what you mean now. Yes, such a beast would be cool. And, with Adobe’s open source announcement, MXMLC could even be packaged up with that particular beast.

By: Sam Feltus

Sam Feltus — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:57:26 +0000

Ever since your demo of TurboGears at the Atlanta Python Meetup, I’ve found creating web content outside a browser unsatisfactory. Web content should be created in a web environment. Right now, TG has textual goodness built in with HTML/JS/CSS. If you added Flash support, you would have audio/visual goodness, with greatly expanded capabilities. In fact, you’d have a web framework that stood out from the pack. You can easily splice Flash onto TG, like in the demo, but it would be cool to build it in.

Splice onto TurboGears
1. Adobe’s MXMLC compiler (for content creation, not for using live)
2. Precompiled SWF’s for the client to import dynamically
3. ActionScript class libraries
4. ActionScript templates to run through TG and into the MXMLC compiler
5. Tie it all together with server side web services, as you noted…

Now, you have Flash with the higher level order of Python and TurboGears.

PS In the above, I use Flash and TG to mean…

Flash == Flash/Silverlight or any other graphically advanced web display technology.

TurboGears == TG or any similar LAMP web framework.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:20:14 +0000

ActiveX for Web 2.0! Wonderful.

By: tazzzzz

tazzzzz — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:50:11 +0000

Hi Sam,

I saw your similar comment over on my recent Adobe Flex posting. What kind of “embrace” are you thinking of? Basically, using one of these rich internet application tools, you just start setting up the server side as a “web services” delivery mechanism rather than a “web page” delivery mechanism. You can do this today pretty easily with nearly any web framework… (In fact, there’s a screencast of Adobe’s James Ward and Bruce Eckel putting together a Flex app with a TurboGears backend using TG’s built in JSON support…)

By: Sam Feltus

Sam Feltus — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:26:15 +0000

It would be sweet to have a LAMP web framework embrace modern web display technologies like Flash and Silverlight.

By: tazzzzz

tazzzzz — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:26:08 +0000

Yeah, it’s a universal binary… so it’s going to have twice the code.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:25:10 +0000

The Mac OS X runtime seems to be 10 MB, not just 4 MB as the Windows version