Flex Pasta » 2008 » August
How many of you logged on to nbcolympics.com to see the footage? I know I did, and at first I did cringe at the fact I had to download Silverlight to see the videos! First I wonder how Silverlight became a partner with NBC. From Microsofts standpoint it is great exposure to get Silverlight on a lot of computers quickly. Only the videos are using Silverlight, the rest of the site is just HTML. I would like to make two comments about the site and would like to hear your feedback as well.
1) I would like to have seen NBC do more with the Olympic site. It is great to be able to search for video by country, athlete, sport, etc, but the interface was poor and sometimes bugy. Silverlight isn’t advanced as Flex, so I am guessing that is why the searching is done with standard HTML. Think of the possibilities with Flex on this screen:
.
2) The Silverlight video player worked really nice! I could quickly flip to any part of the video using the player bar and the video continued almost immeadiatly in the new location. Will Silverlight become a serious competitor to Flex in the coming years? Will Adobe try and challenge Silverlight on the .NET Framework? Does Microsoft have an unfair advantage because they own the .NET and can easily integreate and market Silverlight better? I don’t know the answer to this, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out!
The benefits of using flex for a high traffic login site are enormous! Even if the rest of the site is not in Flex, the login process should be. Here are a few reasons why:
- Security: Sites where security is important and the login page is open to the public: health care, internet banking, online stores, etc. Flex is a flash movie, where images, content, forms, are embedded into one file, make it nearly impossible to duplicate for phishing purposes. HTML websites are open to anyone to steal their code. Within minutes, a newbie hacker can take a site’s html and have a full functioning phishing website that looks just like the original. With Flex, stealing a flash file would take highly advanced skills and much more time to come up with the same scheme.
- Performance: Take an internet banking site for example. Many of them these days have a multi-step login process. Step 1) Enter user name, Step 2) Answer a secret question, Step 3) Enter a password if the image shown is the one you picked out. Internet banking and many other sites heavily rely on the login process. Many users are just logging in for a quick check of something and then logging off. Think of the number of transactions an html application makes in this example for the login process alone: 1) Serve the login page. 2) Serve the secret question page. 3) Serve the Password page. 4) Serve the user’s image. 5) Try and Log user in with password entered. Now with Flex, the SWF file can be placed on the web servers, and once the user has it, they won’t have to download it a second time unless it’s updated. There is much less but more efficient back in forth with the SWF and the Server: 1) User enters user name. Request made. Secret question, secret answer, user’s image is returned. If the user enters the right answer, we show them their picture, without making a second or third call against the application server. 2) Try and Log user in with password entered. With Flex, 2 calls are made to the application server vs the 5 with an html app!! Not to mention the size of the request/response with the Flex app is much smaller.
- User Experience: Flex has the ability to place cool effects and transitions from step to step on a login process. When my web app is at peak usage, those transitions make the app seem to move faster than with an html app. The user won’t feel like they’re using dial up while waiting for the server to respond. The user will feel more confident with this login process and phishing will be virtually eliminated.
Even if a site is not written in Flex, it can still utilize a Flex login process for the added benefits described above. Existing sites don’t have to look at Flex and consider a complete rewrite to gain the benefits. Start with the login process and see what Flex can do to eliminate phishing, improve performance, and add to the user experience!
After many requests, I have posted a Penne Diagram. The diagram is created in Flex and is interactive. Click on the appropriate links and see the source code with each part of the diagram. The example source code is from the Italian Store created during a previous post. Remember, the framework is not set in stone. Post suggestions to improve it! The framework is designed for enterprise Flex applications and is meant to be as lightweight as possible.