Greetings,

to get directly into the situation , I'm running a project that requires an online GUI for the users to interact with etc..
so I've studied alot of possibilities to do that , from making a standalone client to using web-embedded technologies for this particular task.

and I think that a web-embedded solution would be best at the moment , the only problem is that I can't fix my mind toward a certain approach , should I use java scripts or adope flash?

to be honest I'm not a fan of scripting languages , so I thought I could use your console (if you know what I mean) , personnally I'm tending to toward flash , first because it seems richer and because I don't really like java (despite that I've some experience in that language)

to give a more detailed description of what is demanded:
first , the used technology must enjoy full portability i.e it must be compatible with absolutely any browser running on any OS which runs on whatever cpu architecture ..etc

second , the script language must be able to handle in an effective and easy way , rich and complex 2d animations plus full multimedia support (playing sounds etc) and of course mouse and keyboard input.

and finally and most importantly be able to handle network connections (internet sockets ,TCP/IP etc) since this whole script is supposed to be the GUI part of a bigger system.

if you have any other suggestions on whatsoever language could be useful , then plz feel free to talk about it.

and thanks .

I would suggest that you narrow down the requirements:
If you are using the browser as your interface then you will spend a lot of time tweaking incompatibilities between browsers. Either list the browsers for which you are going to support, or avoid the browser and take something like Python which is supported on a number of different OS.

JavaScript != Java

Also, I agree with graemef.

If it's really got to work on all possible platforms ever, and all possible browsers ever, you've ruled out everything but static HTML.

DO you really believe that differences between browsers are so vast? I guess you're a lil bit exaggerating.

shall we take for example Adope Flash 9 , according to Macromedia it's supported on Windows , linux , Solaris (SunOS) and Mac (OS x , etc) .
basically all major Platforms are fine with it , so I think that unless two users have two different versions of Flash installed , there shouldn't be any difference to be noticed.

at least that's what I found when running several flash prog's and animations , on both windows (IE 7) and on suse linux (Mozilla Firefox) .
actually there was only one incompatibility incident where flash 7 is installed by default on Suse 10.1 but after I removed it and got the latest version (9) then everything worked fine.

and after all , How can incompatibility problems arise , when both javascript and Flash are platform-independent script languages that run on the browsers and where the developers (Sun Microsystems and Macromedia) have done a tiresome job to assure this independency ?

You guys are really confusing me , am I missing something here or what?

You are confusing Javascript and Java.

Neither Flash nor Java are scripting languages, although Flash programming language is close to Javascript (ECMAScript precisely), they are both compiled to bytecode targeted to a virtual machine.

First of all , I'm not confusing Javascript and Java ! ( i know that the two are different)

Well , you say that Neither Flash nor Java are scripting languages then you contradict yerself by saying that they run on a virtual machine (in other words they are scripts !) since a loose definition of scripts could be " a set of instructions that are executed via an interpreter (virtual machine or whatever you may call it) instead of being compiled to machine code ...."

Anyways , I'm NOT posting this to argue about the terminology of scripts and scripting languages.
After reading about the possible options for a while , I've decided to go with Flash .

Problem solved and thank you!

Well that's one problem you'll have to consider. Different versions will behave differently and looking at Adobe's website for some OS the recommended version is 7 (Legacy windows & OS9 and Solaris)

I would say that if you are going to be investing a lot of effort on development then it may be worth avoiding the weaknesses of the browser.

Well , a good point indeed !
but the fact is that avoiding the "weaknesses" of the browsers , would result in the need of dealing with more severe weaknesses .
The only alternative to web-embedded solutions would be making a client from scratch for each and every OS that's out there , and that gonna be a pain in the ass (if ya know what I mean)

A key point is to target as much users as possible thru an interface that's generic despite the users Box , therefore requesting the user to get the latest flash for example would be much easier than telling him to download and run an executable that only runs on a specifiec machine etc.
I'm arguing from the client's perspective but also from the developers point of view (me in this case)

Nonetheless , a future effort for programming a full-blown client software is inevitable in the long run , but for now a web-based Gui is more than suffient.

That's okay. However you wrote Javascript was a product from Sun that run on a virtual machine, which led me to believe you were confusing them.
That's a controversial subject. You may agree that it isn't java source code that run on the JVM, but bytecodes.
Bytecodes are machine code. The fact the machine is real or not shouldn't change the concept.
I was suspecting that from your first post as you wrote you didn't like java anyway. Flash is the better choice for you then, especially now you have narrowed the requirements to mainstream platforms.

Having done much web work, he really isn't. It's a PITA. By the end, everything feels like a hack

As long as the browser using the plug-in supports NSAPI. Also, Adobe doesn't even have a version of their flash player for amd64/emt64 linux yet... And Windows, linux, solaris, and Mac OS X is hardly exhaustive. Does solaris cover intel 32 & 64 bit machines as well, or just alpha?

Also, remember that asking a user to install the latest flashplayer or Java is a hassle. If you just have regular home-based users, it's not a huge issue, but if they're corporate users, they may not be able to just install whatever they want.

I think, by far, your safest bet if you need somewhat dynamic behaviour is to use a server-side programming language and XHTML+CSS. If your really adventurous you should look into AJAX as well.

No, look at cross OS libraries, or languages. For example Java, Python, Ruby all provide networking support native in the target OS or my personal favourite is QT which will compile to native machine code from the same source (C++). But there are many other solutions out there.

And you can also make it easier for the user when it comes to downloading the client software by using a scripting language on the server (eg PHP) to identify the clients OS and from that information suggesting which software they should be downloading.

Anyway, I gather that you are happy with flash (in that it addresses many of your requirements) so it just leaves me to wish you all the best with your endeavour.

Appreciating the info you've posted folks!

Oh , Thank you!

interestingly similar: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=540702

also, scripting languages vs. compiled language.

a scripted language has no equivelent binary executable associated with the source. it is all ascii text interpreted line by line and usually calls programs made by compiled binary executables.

a compiled language takes source code in ascii format and compiles it into byte code which contains machine language instructions (opcodes) specific for a particular processor (e.g.- m68k, wdc6502, x86, powerpc, jvm, dec-alpha...)