JD over at Adobe gives a beatdown/retort to some Ajax evagalist.

Adobe/Flash has bent over backwards to accommodate the Ajax crowd. Flash has a robust interface for communicating back and forth with JavaScript. The success of Ajax does little to hold Flash back and might even help promote it in the long run. However, the opposite is not true.

If someone really wants to settle this, or at least put a big nail in this argument, they should hold a contest. Set up the backend server with the database and all and then give a team of experts in Ajax and another team of Flex/Flash experts a deadline to complete the client side interface. Then let users vote on which one they like the best.

I think it’s important to have an accurate estimation of the time involved in the work because that’s needed to get an idea of what the cost of development might be. You would also want a number of teams for each project and additionally a number of projects to give an accurate baseline on what each environment is capable of.

Of course one of the projects would have to be video/audio based. I want to see how an Ajax team might pull that off without using Flash. :-)

If someone really wants to do this I’m sure there’s a way of setting up this contest so that it’s fair and accurate. Go Flash!!! :-)

John C. Dvorak at PC Magazine gives Flash Video another thumbs up in his column Watching Things Fall Apart . Is there anyone out there who isn’t on the dole of a competitor who has a compelling reason not to use Flash for web video? If there is I haven’t heard from them.

I think that what’s best about this is that users are getting a good experience watching Flash video. Granted most people out there watching YouTube or Google Video have no idea that Flash is involved in the process of watching the video but more and more are learning and therefore creating a positive association with Flash.