Flash + Data = ?
Macromedia links Flash apps to data.
My thoughts as I’m reading this: Sounds good, sounds good, sounds about right, hrm,, no direct MySQL support, sounds good, sounds good, ColdFusion? People still use that? Sounds good, sounds good… $999 price tag for Flash Remoting? Good luck, Macromedia.
Just as they always do, Macromedia comes really close to getting something.. then just leaves you feeling screwed. To use PHP/MySQL, you still have to go through the still-required extra steps of taking MySQL data into XML, and writing your own ActionScript parser just so you can get nifty vector animations along with your dynamic data in the same compiled binary file.
Macromedia’s latest efforts would have you (if you feel like paying a ton of money instead) buy a ColdFusion license for at least $1299, or as much as $4999 (depending on the level of quality you need), buy a MSSQL Server license for at least $4999/processor, buy Windows 2000 server for $1199 to run the entire thing on….PLUS the $999 for Flash Remoting.
On the other hand (back to PHP), you could just write some XML-parsing code in ActionScript and some MySQL-XML translating code in PHP. Run it on Linux. Licensing fees? Nada. Massive development environment? Nope. Expensive production environment? Perhaps, but still not on-par with the Windows/ColdFusion world.
Or you could just use XHTML, forego the animation and buzzwords and get your files down to like 4k instead of 400k. Skip the XML step and get dyanamic data in its native form into your native code.
Why was I excited about Flash again? Oh, right. Because it takes 3x as long for me to produce so I get paid 3x the amount. Right.