Flash is nice, eyecatching, fun for games and web intro and navigation as well as e-learning and a couple other stuff…
Building a desktop application with Flash is however a different story.
Of course you’ll need a “wrapper” around your swf to allow it to communicate with the file system to write to the hard disk, connect to a database and similar common programming tasks.
Choosing a “wrapper” is a hard task as you need to assess the stability/functionality of each and what you can and cannot do reliably with each.
Moreover, each wrapper, and I really mean each!, has its set of known bugs that you’ll have to discover and learn to workaround or to live with…
After seriously digging in each of the available commercial wrappers out there, I’ve found the following:
– There is no “best in the market” for every functionality.
– There is no “has all you need” either
– They use different objects/methods rendering the usage of a combination of them a pain.
– They are all more or less unstable/buggy.
– They do not have their own IDE, so don’t expect any serious debugging involving stepping the code or setting breakpoints or the like.
– They do not support all types of DLLs, especially .Net Dlls.
In conclusion, making a productive/stable program is not an area where flash wrappers excell, They can be used to makes smalll screen mates or eye candies or the like but not serious programs, not for the time being at least…