Comments on: Flash vs. Javascript for Web Mapping Applications: Our Experience with Maker!

By: Jaca

Jaca — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:25:21 +0000

look http://www.cromaps.com flash searchable city maps

By: Sean Gorman

Sean Gorman — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:59:02 +0000

Thanks for the perspective – still trying to catch up on the details of where Flash is going. Interesting about the text engine. We are doing some Metacarta integration for a customer and could be quiet handy. We’ve been looking at some interesting blends of JavaScript and Flash for our next release even within the Flash app. Hopefully should work out. We did Finder Express in Maker with JavaScript and should be able to refine that approach for other pieces as well.

By: Tom Carden

Tom Carden — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:10:39 +0000

Not sure. The underlying scripting tech behind Flash’s actionscript 3 is open source and moving into Firefox, resulting in great speed increases. It also results in increased competition for Webkit too, so they’ve also made great speed improvements this year. And Chrome is another story. All this makes the raw computation speed of javascript much closer to Flash, but Flash still wins for vector graphics and I don’t see canvas or SVG touching it soon (although if it’s in IE8 I may change my story…)

The idea of Canvas and SVG stuff is always appealing, not least because in theory it still works on the iphone, android, mobile opera, etc. and also because of native parsing of JSON But IE support for canvas is essential and it’s not there yet without third-party plug-ins or slow emulation in VML or (ha!) Flash.

Also, the new version of Flash has some excellent support for graphics style objects, a new text engine, faster (and completely custom) bitmap filters, type-safe arrays, and more. All these things are going to be useful for maps and are going to be faster and better supported than Flash than browsers for a while yet.

In terms of interactive graphics features and performance I’d say the browser is 2 years behind Flash, at most – and given the different constraints on the platforms, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But in terms of computation speed I’d say there’s not much in it now at all.

By: Sean Gorman

Sean Gorman — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:17:53 +0000

The funny thing is I usually loose all my scribbled notes from a conference, but some how kept those numbers. I think we got slightly better numbers than that with Flash if you do not count the parsing of the data to the client, but just details at this point.

We had some real cross browser problems on the first version of GeoCommons where we were using a javascript API for the heat mapping. IE would not handle the alpha transparency for the PNGs and the work around was clunky. Not sure what my point is all this other than generally agreeing with you.

Do you think JavaScript will at some point surpass Flash when it comes to data rendering?

By: Tom Carden

Tom Carden — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:02:13 +0000

Oh dear – I knew those numbers would come back to haunt me! They are made up, but I stand by them as a rule of thumb. I will note here that out of all of the available web-based technologies, javascript’s capabilities are accelerating fastest.

FWIW the main reason I continue to use Flash is because that way I don’t have to think about cross-browser/cross-platform issues at all, and the tools (Flex Builder in my case) really are better (Firebug is awesome, but profiling and debugging in Eclipse is easier). The cross-browser/cross-platform issue is really apparent when you start thinking about interactive vector graphics which are clearly essential to Maker.

In my obviously biased opinion I think you made the right choice, although at some point the data gets too big (like map data itself) and you end up moving to tile-based approaches where javascript really shines right now.