So.. I took a break from anything but PHP for a while. Didn’t really focus on learning any new browser based technology for the past 6 months or so. Today, I took a look around.. Am going to be using the the Flash Media Server in my class this semester and thought I would checkout the Flex SDK (which is pretty nice I must say, much much better than developing in Flash).
Looking through that got me to wonder what people were thinking of Silverlight, Google’s Chrome and finally JavaFX.
Talk about eye-opening.. I think RIA’s (rich internet applications) have arrived!
Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash competitor impressed me initially with their cross-platform push. It was a nice change and the streaming of the Olympics looked great.
Chrome with it’s revamped JavaScript interpreter seems as though it will be a pretty big game changer as well. (Wonder what that means for FireFox.) WebKit seems to have electrified the browser space (cross-platform and device (iPhone, S60, Safari, Chrome and so on)).
JavaFX looks like it *might* be something.. (This is my secret wish as Java is my first love but Sun has let me down so many times in the past with video support that I am not going to even bother until they support H.264 cross-platform)
Flash with it’s new H.264 support is what has me the most interested..
In any case, I don’t think I will be doing anything more than playing with most of the features of any of these. I will be using Flash for it’s video support and controlling it through JavaScript and using AJAX with PHP for the time being..
Ok.. Time to get back to FMS..