Parleys.com, a RIA Case Study

First of all I would like to say that I am a big fan of parleys and like this talk very much.

But I have to disagree with the speaker about a need of two environments for developing Flex and AIR application.
Every Flex application can be easily released as an AIR application, because for creation of an ".air" file you just need a SWF file and an application description file.

In FDT (fdt.powerflasher.com) we do not separate a Flex, pure ActionScript or an AIR Project because those are all Flash project.
There is always the same compilation process and you always get the same result - SWF file.
The only thing that matters are the libraries (SWC files) you are linking.
You need "playerglobal.swc" for SWF running in a Browser PlugIn and "airglobal.swc" for an SWF running in AIR Runtime (by the way playerglobal is a subset of airglobal, airglobal have some additional classes for file handling, sqlite, HTMLRendering etc...).

Also the flash application them selves are not signed.
You sign only the installation bundle (".air" file) that you create from your Flash application.

We are trying to choose between different RIA technologies. I have two questions for people who have experience in this:
1) Which tool allowed you to create the a rich website the fastest (GWT or Flash)
2) Which tool was more "fun" to write in?

The above talk is almost one year old, so I'd like to inform the viewers that we're in a beta phase of the next major release of Parleys.com, available at beta.parleys.com.

New features are :
- Introduction of Spaces and Channels
- An even more improved version of the player template, with slide previews in the timeline
- Support for comment threads using your profile image
- More powerful search support
- RSS feeds for all available content
- and some other important features we'll announce at next month Devoxx event :)

The biggest addition is our multi-track rich media Publisher which allows you to import your PDF presentation, video's, auto-detect slide changes and publish the content to your dedicated channel. See the publisher in action @ beta.parleys.com/#st=5&sl=1&id=375

Stephan

If you want to copy the Flex app in to an AIR app then I agree you can just wrap the functionality in a SWC file.

However when the AIR app has additional features like accessing the file system, offline logic, communicating with the running flex client etc. then before you know it becomes a separate application.

It would be nice if the AIR logic could be embedded in the Flex version and made available when the Flex app is signed, so you can break out of the browser sandbox and have one and the same application (similar to what JavaFX is doing). That was the point I wanted to make.

Cheers,

Stephan

I am not quite familiar with JavaFX but you are right in Flash you will end up with two applications if you develop for web and AIR, specially if AIR version has some additional feature.

But in my opinion it's all about reuse and extension. The core functionality of your product can be compiled to a SWF and than it is a full functional application. If you want to extend it than you can load it and add some additional logic.
OSGi works in same way you have a core bundles and bundles that has dependencies on it.

How parleys streaming the video ? Any idea Either they are using Red5 server for streaming?