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As principal partner of DataCurl LLC, Dan Wilson runs both the consulting practice and ChallengeWave.com, a way to help employees start and stick with healthier lifestyles. Before launching DataCurl, Dan held numerous senior program and development positions in such industries as Technical Consulting, Health Care, Online Publishing and Government Contracting. Dan is an avid participant in technology communities; an Adobe Community Professional, manager of the Triangle ColdFusion User Group in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Managing Director of the popular Model-Glue framework and contributor to numerous open source projects based on ColdFusion, Flex and AIR platforms. Dan presents on ColdFusion, Flex and Rapid Development Techniques at popular conferences around the world. You can find his thoughts on ColdFusion, Flex, AIR and other technology matters at http://www.nodans.com and some occasional ramblings on food at http://blog.chefdanwilson.com. Dan has posted 31 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

On RIA Monetization

12.27.2007
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Recently Yahoo unveiled their new Maps product. Most shocking is the new Yahoo Maps is built on an AJAX platform, replacing the previous Flex 1.5 implementation. Why would Yahoo throw away an entire product, an entire investment in Flex technology? Was it because Flex is inferior to AJAX? Anyone who has dealt with cross platform issues with CSS/HTML rendering and differing Javascript implementations would laugh at that notion. The reason Yahoo ditched Flex was simple. Advertising. Advertising on the web is quite mature. There exists a number of players and technologies for serving, tracking, billing and displaying ads on the Internet. Without exception, each are based on serving ads inside HTML. Since usage of Yahoo Maps is 'free' (as in Beer), Yahoo relies on increased traffic to increase ad clicks, thus increasing profit. Speaking from a purely technological point of view, Flex is far superior for rendering and interacting with mapping interfaces. The performance of RIAs running on Flash Player 9 is orders of magnitude greater than Javascript in the browser. Maintaining state is much better done in Flex, than Ajax. That and 50 cents, the old saying goes, will get you a cup of coffee. In this day and age of 'free' applications, there will be advertising. Unless Adobe levels the advertising playing field, Flex will consistently lose out to traditional browser based (HTML/CSS/Javascript) implementations. Adobe, are you listening?
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Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
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