Macromedia Flash, or Adobe Flash, is well-know web technology.It gained popularity because of its sufficient capabilities for representing multimedia on the web. Flash, firstly created by Macromedia was bought by Adobe and currently known as Adobe Flash. First release of Flash supported few futures such as bitmap integration, sound and buttons. But still, It was a revolution in web, because it allowed to bring some new elements of interactivity to the internet. Since then, Flash potential redoubled. Nowadays, Adobe Flash CS3 is a programming platform, vector graphic editor, animation application and so on. Now, we can create detached full-cycle web applications using Flash. Flash web applications could implement Model View Control architecture, what is a great achievement of Adobe developers. And of course, capability of embedding animation makes Flash web sites interactive and beautiful. But, should we use Flash as a primary developing tool for creating web applications, or web sites? My strong point is that we should avoid focusing on flash as on the primary technology for web developing. My point is based on economical aspects of development, technology limitations, browser problems, search engines low rankings, and existence of vicarious technologies, such as AJAX that don’t have listed minuses.

    First, Flash development takes more time than DHTML + CSS development, what increases cost of project. Sometimes it is really hard to separate work of designers from programming work, what causes programming start only after design and animation are completely done. And it is a common practice that animation and programming or their parts are done by one person. It is not a positive aspect too, because of human factor: it is really rare, when person is a great programmer and artist in one time. From my personal experience, I have learned that 9 of 10 flash web sites have ugly design or messy code

    Second, Flash doesn’t have tools for interacting with relational Database. Data layer in Flash represented by XML or text files. It doesn’t allow to create really big data tables, because search by them and work with them could be really slow. As a result we cant have a portals on flash, and it could be a problem to have even a blog or forum using Flash only. There is a way out of it. Flash has tools for interacting with other programming languages, such as JAVA, PHP, .Net, or ColdFusion. But is not really simple and it works not really fast. Third, most of browsers have problems with the way flash web sites work. For example, the button “Back” doesn’t work in Flash web sites. It could sound like not a big deal, unless you started to go through the readable and deeply enclosure content. Web Guru Jacob Nilsen, claim that the “Back” button is the second important navigation element right after the URL pane.

    But the main disadvantage of Flash is that flash web sites are not parse able by the most of search engines. Flash web site is just a cartoon for web crawler (search engine parser) and most of crawlers can not read data from Flash web site. It cut out web marketing, news portals and other search dependant web sites. Google crawler is only one crawler that could read Flash web sites data. However, Google have not announced what ranking Flash web sites get after crawling.

    However, people who stand for Flash say that Flash web sites are the most interactive and beautiful. They say that Flash web sites are very catchy and effective. I am absolutely agreed with it. But we can gain good look of web site by using embedded Flash elements and well-developed design. Multimedia data still could be in Flash, what is also fine. And we can have Flash interactivity and even more by using AJAX. But we don’t need to have completely Flash web site in that case. We can still have text in HTML. And we can store data in Database, what will increase our web site speed.

    As I mentioned before, I am not a follower of choosing Flash as a primary technology for web sites development. Flash is a great tool for work with multimedia, cartoon animation, vector graphic and many more. But it is still weak as a programming platform. As a web developer and project architecture designer I would recommend to use Flash as a primary tool for supporting multimedia components, banners, sound and video. However my strong point is that choosing the Flash as a primary developing technology will border your web site abilities and visitors amount.