The ups and downs of Flash

Even if you're on the web for a few minutes a week, you have undoubtedly seen a website (or part of a website) developed in flash. Adobe Flash is a very important part of a developer's toolkit these days. However, it's important to note its limitations.

One main limitation that Flash is that it is notorious for is updateability. Many Flash developers in the early days created a website that was strictly Flash, and many of them had to tell their clients how everything was now going to take twice as long and cost twice as much to make changes. And don't even think about having the client update the site themselves. Flash's development environment is more complex than a traditional HTML development environment (for example Adobe Dreamweaver). In Dreamweaver it takes about 4 clicks to insert a photo. With Flash it takes many more, and you also have to deal with organizational aspects of that image within the development environment itself. In short, there's just more you have to deal with when you insert a photo in Flash, not to mention every other aspect of development.

Another limitation (although I use the term "limitation" looser here) is programming. Flash uses a language called Actionscript. Actionscript is very powerful and also easy for a developer to learn since is similar to other languages. You can use Flash to connect to and update databases, and you can create some very powerful web applications with it. However, the Flash environment is based on a timeline. It gets very difficult and confusing to put pieces of code all over a timeline, and Flash can have many timelines in one file. This issue has been addressed in more recent versions of Flash, and it has helped. But it is still a persistant issue. I'm sure Adobe will work on this more in future versions.

So for now, what can you do with Flash? Currently, many developers treat Flash like a "component" in a website. It isn't the whole website, but a few pieces of it. Games, video, and animations, Flash when used correctly can add a lot of "punch" to a website.