[Chicago] Graphing libraries

[James Snyder]

Personally, I have no major technical complaints about Flash at the moment, and I get irritated if I have a desktop browser that doesn't have a stable Flash implementation (thank you Adobe for finally doing a 64-bit native Flash for Linux!). 

That said, I think my own aversion to building anything on top of it is just that it's closed. There's also no free/open implementation of it that doesn't fall short in some major way. I'm not sure if I'm in the minority or not, but I'd say that I've often been eventually burned by relying on some sort of proprietary or closed platform. Flash is a little more ubiquitous than some closed things that I've had trouble with in the past, but I'd still remain hesitant. 

The other distinction that I would certainly draw with something like this is that if I'm writing something I plan to use once, or a few times, I care much less about this issue. This is a much bigger deal if the project might be maintained over an indefinite period of time. 

-jsnyder 

P.S.: I am not an FSF zealot. Closed vs. open does not make anything either evil or not. Although there are certainly evil open projects: http://vigor.sourceforge.net/ 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Garrett Smith" <g at rrett.us.com> 
To: "The Chicago Python Users Group" <chicago at python.org> 
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 4:33:38 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central 
Subject: Re: [Chicago] Graphing libraries 


----- "James Snyder" <jbsnyder at fanplastic.org> wrote: 

> If you're looking for some user interaction on the client side as well, without the ugliness of doing it in Flash 

I'll bite. 

So, I have a Flash disabler on Firefox (I recommend it) to avoid the obvious problems with ads. I do though appreciate the fact I can watch decent quality streaming video. The experience is 1000% better than running Java in the browser and, all in all, really not bad at all. 

I totally dig Google street view, which, as I recall, uses Flash. 

I can't really imagine running a desktop browser without Flash. Perhaps though I'm missing something -- is Adobe funding diamond mining in Senegal with their Flash juggernaut? 

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