Certain enterprises block ActiveX content at the firewall, thereby either knowingly or unknowingly blocking the installation of the Flash player. For at least two of our clients, this has been reason enough to go with HTML over Flash.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Are there any statistics out there on the number of enterprises that implement such a policy? What evidence (if any) is there to counter the claim that this is widespread in enterprises? (A part of my does wonder if perhaps certain enterprises here in the UK are not more technologically conservative than those in other countries when it comes to these things.)

(more...)

I've just started looking through the open source AS2Lib project. My initial reactions are mixed. There is some work towards implementing basic reflection which I find interesting (I had implemented a similar method as part of the MooseDoc documentation system for AS1) but also certain additions that I find quite redundant. For example: Do we really need to implement the Iterator pattern in AS2?

It's understandable that someone coming from Java who wants to make AS2 feel more like Java would want an iterator since they are used quite frequently in Java to loop over collections. AS (and thus AS2) has a for...in loop -- a construct that Java does *not* have (the latest version did get a rudimentary version of it but it is nowhere as powerful as the one in ActionScript.)

(more...)

Recently I've noticed a increase in the amount of spam on the What Is Flash wiki. Due to the way that particular wiki is set up, it would not be a problem for me to lock the Wiki from edits or require logins but that runs contrary to the "spirit of the Wiki". However, discussions such as the one on WhyWikiWorks don't take into consideration automated spam bots -- something that's hinted at on WikiWipeout.

It appears that What Is Flash is not the first Wiki to be hit by Wiki Spam (see this page on WakkaWiki, for example) and there is a page discussing Wiki Spam on Ward Cunningham's Wiki (the "mother wiki" since it was the first.) Of course, it is easier to spam What Is Flash since it uses my WysiwygWiki engine (which allows you to update the pages using a visual HTML editor instead of cyptic WikiCode.)

(more...)