[Sigia-l] Facets, Flash, and Fun

[Listera]

"Christopher Fahey [askrom]" wrote:
 
> I really had to jump up to correct this. To understand the possibilities
> of rich Flash interfaces, you have to discard some preconceptions of how
> HTML web interfaces must work (query/response/repeat).

(Other than dragging, you don't need Flash at all to fetch/display the Canon
example, without having to refresh the whole page as you suggested: iFrames
will do the trick. Bu that's not my point.)

My comments weren't referring to this example at all. I was making a general
comment on 'sliders' as a concept for dataset access/display abstraction. To
me, the least interesting examples of sliders is when all the data is
locally cached, simply because the amount of data that you can locally cache
is very limited and thus the applications you can build with locally
cached/cacheable data are similarly limited. Sliders get interesting when
you can actually query *large* (perhaps multiple) datasets *in real-time*
and then dynamically populate the results on a page, without a refresh. In
other words, not just a couple dozen selections on a page, but (almost) an
infinite selection/dataset that you might see with something like
PriceGrabber. 

Fetching data from a datastore in real-time, in whatever format, is exactly
the same for HTML as it is for Flash. You format a query and dispatch it to
a server (of one sort or another) and get a response in one form or another,
query/response/repeat. What's different is what the client does with the
response. You can make an HTML page display newly returned data without
refreshing the whole page; but that's considerably easier in Flash,
especially from a browser compatibility POV. In this sense, Flash doesn't
rewrite the 'query/response/repeat' notion at all, when it's accessing a
live datastore.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba