Sam Aparicio

I met Yakov Fain a couple of years ago during a blustery NJ weekend at a Flex bootcamp course he was giving. He is damn smart, and is publishing his second Flex book on OReilly soon. He’s also funny, in a non-self-aware way. Hope you meet him at some conference soon.

One of his russian-english signature sentences: “The mankind went nuts”. Which he used when speaking about the web development community when AJAX was published.

When talking about Flex vs AJAX, he made a really good analysis, and somehow, the bad parts of AJAX stuck with me:

• Code is in the clear
• A refresh forces a reload
• Need to write code to check that all the Javascript code has arrived before app can correctly execute
• AJAX is a different kind of lock-in. (Flex is big-guy lockin and Ajax small guy lockin.)
• Cannot jump out of the browser
• Need to check cross-browser compatibility
• No data bindings and no closures.

So there you go.