On 03/16/2010 04:12 AM, John R. Dennison wrote: > Plus the last I checked flash was still a closed technology, > didn't we go through the whole closed-source thing with Trent's > client? Do we want to go down that road again? > > Historically flash has also not been the most stable plugin; > I still hear almost daily of incidents where flash barfs > on both linux and win32/64 platforms. Not to mention that > I don't see flash being a viable platform for netrek > requirements. > This is entirely FUD. *Flex* is completely open as of release 3, and this is the programming language you would use to write your Flash applications in. Who cares whether the player is open source or not - as long as it is freely available? Flash has been stable for 32-bit for many years, and stable for 64-bit for several years. Most Facebook applications that people waste their time on all day long are written in Flash. Why shouldn't people be wasting their time playing Netrek instead of Bejeweled Blitz? Perhaps you are talking about the re-writes of Flash by the free / open source community that barely work? > IM(ns)HO, this is just a waste of time and effort; time and > effort that could be much better spent elsewhere. > Another valuable reason to learn Flex, is that it can open job opportunities. Many companies are writing their client applications in Flex instead of Java these days as the Flex tools for mocking user interfaces is just cuter and more productive, and the Flex capabilities for making fancy graphics easily is just nice. Cheers, mark