Flash Alternatives: Swish and ASP Turbine
By Clayton Crooks
While Macromedia's Flash continues to gain steam, many developers are looking for alternatives for developing Flash output. One viable option you may already know about is the recently released Adobe LiveMotion. While LiveMotion is an excellent solution, Swish and ASP Turbine, a couple of lesser-known packages, deserve attention too.
It's worth mentioning that these programs are authored independently of Macromedia Flash and only need Flash plug-ins to run. Macromedia has been thoughtful enough to support third-party application development with the release of a free Flash format SDK (Software Developers Kit), which is available from www.macromedia.com. This free SDK allows third parties to write applications that support output for the Flash file format.
ASP Turbine is a full-featured implementation while Swish is much easier to use but has limited functionality. Depending on the type of development solution you need, one of these will probably fit your individual requirements.
Swish
The first option we'll look at is Swish, an easy-to-use solution developed by DDJ Holdings, an Australian company.
