Simple animation - Flash or jQuery?

Question

I have some animation I would like to try, kind of a shopping cart/checkout action animation. wanted to know if flash or jQuery (JavaScript) would be best?

The backend is all in PHP and I was thinking of using AMFPHP (If Flash) or jQuery (Any frameworks???) but wanted to know the drawbacks/features of each approach.

Thanks for any advice, --Phill

--UPDATE--

Okay so the animation I would like is when something is purchased to display some text and a image of the item in some sort of slick animation. Want to give it that Flash feel but maybe I could do this in jQuery?

-- UPDATE-- Would like it to have a TV commercial feel but interactive, not sure of the animation(s). Clean, Crisp, Fresh, etc...

Answer 1

JQuery is better because it's easy to program a compelling experience with just notepad. My rule of thumb is "If you don't need flash, then don't use flash." Also a lot of people are using iPhones to surf the internet now, you don't want to alienate that market by plopping a big flash hurdle in front of them that they can't jump.

Check out Themeforest.net and see what designers are doing with just JQuery. It's pretty amazing how far we've come with just simple javascript.

Answer 2

A lot of animation that we typically turned to Flash for can be accomplished via jQuery. Obviously, frame based (onion skinning) type animation (characters, cartoons, etc.) is still best left to flash, but nearly any type of animation you'd do in flash with tweens (position, size, color, opacity, width, height, etc.) can easily be accomplished with most of the modern .js libraries including jQuery.

So, yes, jQuery would certainly work depending on the particular type of animation you are looking for.

UPDATE (per your updated info):

"TV commercial feel but interactive"

What does that mean? If I were to interpret that literally, what you want to do is produce actual video based content and wire it up in Flash.

However, that seems like a heavy overhead to just check out of a shopping cart. I'd really think about this from a UX perspective before going too far down this path.

"Clean, Crisp, Fresh"

So not dirty and blury? ;)