Yahoo Maps 放弃使用Flex转向AJAX - 圣叹 - 我们面对现实.我们忠于理...

Yahoo Maps 放弃使用Flex转向AJAX
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19:31 ,kono
【题外话::今天Myspace贺卡系统正式上线，居然收到不少贺卡：不再是测试卡，而是众多用户发来的，有意思，看着这么多用户使用自己的作品，也不枉累死累活一个星期。】
Yahoo Maps 是早期RIA应用的经典示例，采用Flex1.5开发。在Flex升级到2.0.1，ActionScript升级到3.0之际，RIA在2007年大放异彩，AS程序员短缺之际，Yahoo Maps 的团队变的支离破碎，纷纷跳槽去了更高的职位：ESRIA, Disney Internet Group, Fidelity, Metaliq, and Ribbit。于是... 当Google, Mapquest, ESRI, 甚至National Geographic都在部署基于Flash Player的GIS服务时，Yahoo Maps 却转向AJAX。
ByTed：
Today Yahoo Maps turned off the the Flex 1.5 based maps application and launched a new version built upon AJAX. Having been involved with Yahoo Maps since I joined Adobe in 2006, seeing this app move to AJAX is troublesome for me because many of the reasons it moved were non-technical and I believe that Yahoo missed an opportunity in adopting ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9.
Flex 1.5 is much harder to develop with compared to Flex 2.0. In several cases development can take 2X longer using Flex 1.5 vs Flex 2.0 but the version difference of .5 makes this seem deceptively minor. Flex 2 was a ground up re-write of Flex on ActionScript 3 utilizing clean API's and a new JIT VM in Flash Player 9. Code execution is 20+ times faster than prior versions of Flash Player and the API changes really remove the development barrier to making rich applications. Yahoo was having a difficult time maintaining the Flex 1.5 version of Yahoo Maps and as Flex 2.0 took off, the developers on Maps were lured away by higher rates. Currently there is not a single Flex developer left from the original Yahoo Maps team and they are all now working at high level Flex positions at ESRIA, Disney Internet Group, Fidelity, Metaliq, and Ribbit. Flex 2.0's success in 2007 lead to a developer shortage and the Yahoo Maps team was gutted of its Flex talent given market conditions.
Advertising using Flash Player is commonplace online but putting Flash advertising inside a Flash application is hard given different frame rates. Yahoo has a javascript ad api that is ready to add into any html based application but with Flash based solutions all ad apis needed to be custom developed and maintained. When companies create Flash advertising they encode them at a certain frame rate. If the frame rate of the Flash application is faster or slower than the rate of the advertisement then it will play incorrectly. The irony is that you cannot easily put Flash advertising into a Flash application today without modification of the original SWF. The Flash Player team is working on a very elegant solution for this in Flash Player 10 but this made montization of Yahoo Maps more difficult than it needed to be. We need to solve this problem and it MUST be drop dead easy to add advertising into Flash content.
It is also frustrating for me to see nearly every other maps provider enhancing mapping applications with Flash Player. Google, Mapquest, ESRI, and even National Geographic are all leveraging Flash Player within their current mapping applications. With the ability to work with image data in memory, vector maps, optimized data loading, alternative views (street view) , filters, and custom user interface elements, Flash Player is an ideal medium for maps and map syndication/integration.
Long story short, we have some work to do. We need to make Flex/Flash work with advertizing so that it can become the primary content not the ads. We need to get more developers trained on using Flash/Flex and especially ActionScript 3 so that teams and solutions can grow. We also need to highlight the API's within Flash Player and make them easier to adopt. Many developers have no idea that these API's even exist. As a medium, Flash Player still has some very large barriers to cross to see larger scale adoption and mainstream use.
I want to congratulate the Yahoo Maps team on delivering a great AJAX implementation. Sincerely, what they have accomplished is really great and is technically awesome in terms of compatibility and performance. The issue for me is that I know that maps leveraging Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3 could be dramatically better than anything in the market and as a long time Yahoo user, I wanted to see them jump ahead.
Yahoo! Maps on Flex 1.5, you will be missed!
InTed 's blog, he also shared a new projcet (namedRibbit) about VOIP(through the use of Adobe's RTMP protocol ) based Flash: