New Google Analytics Mixes up Flash and Ajax
Just checked my sites stats and noticed that Google, the Ajax kings, have added some Flash spice to Google Analytics. Each technology handling what it does best, Flash as the presentation layer and Ajax as the data workhorse.
Flash/Flex has been blowing up lately, it’s faster growing book category for O’Reilly (via Ryan Stewart), and every Flex developer I know has projects flying at them left and right. Come on you Ajax folk you know you want some AS.
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I’m curious about your assertion that Ajax is better than Flash as the “data workhorse.” Flash is also capable of transferring data remotely to a server and has good XML features. Why do you think that Ajax (Javascript) is better for that?
Comment by topfunky — May 11, 2007 @ 8:48 am
Yes that was a bit of blanket statement.
In this case Ajax is the best way to send data back and forth because there are multiple Flash components on a page. I’ve had cases where I had three or more Flash components on a page that tried to load data all at once and it was quicker to get the data via Ajax and have it passed to the components. That said 99% of the time I use Flash Remoting or XML straight to Flash.
Comment by KreeK — May 14, 2007 @ 8:22 am
Can you give more explanations on your observation?
Is that because you have ajax as a centralized hub for data communication or ajax itself talks faster? Is there a way for flash component to communicate with each other? thanks
Comment by ray — May 23, 2007 @ 8:35 am
If you have multiple flash components embeded on a HTML page then yes I would use ajax as a hub/queue for data transfer. If you want two seperate flash components to talk to each other you can use flash’s ‘ExternalInterface’ to send data down to JavaScript which would then pass the data to the other flash movie again with ExternalInterface http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_15683
If you don’t need flash to talk to the page Flash Remoting or Flash’s built in XML commands are a better bet.
Comment by KreeK — May 23, 2007 @ 9:03 am