When Flash forms were first released by on CFMX7 everyone hooed and haaed it as the best thing that ever happened to UI development since Berners-Lee invented HTML.
Like others, I quickly ported some applications to Flash forms and I was grinning from ear to ear like a hobbit but it didn’t take long before I was brought down to reality. Brought down hard.One, on the local intranet, Flash forms are terribly slower than the forms they replaced. And if you want to talk about their excellent validations as a reason, there other nifty JavaScripts outside that do the same thing with less bandwidth affinity. That is on the intranet; the internet experience is even worse.
Two, Flash forms don’t scale well as if a browser is missing Flash player 7, and if it is not in an environment where it can upgrade itself, the whole application falls apart. You don’t see anything except some wicked looking red X mark. Duh!
Three, Flash forms are pretty but a lot of other forms could be made prettier. You even run into a brick wall when you want to style Flash forms as it only supports inline CSS. Man am gripping!
I did an application for some dudes which we tested extensively. Along the line, the group office decided to upgrade to an Active Directory environment with new security policies. Lo and behold, my whole application fell apart. I had to go back and recode all the portions with Flash forms to normal HTML forms with JS validations.
May be I am not smart, but in this case, Flash forms whipped me silly. I have learnt my lessons
