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Comment by AshleysBrain | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?

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I ran one of the large flash game portals. We had 100,000 Flash games. It matters because of distribution. One distribution mechanism was through MochiMedia and MochiAds. You'd upload an SWF to MochiMedia's site and they would aggregate it out to thousands of other sites. Without a playable package format you would have had millions and millions of files. Game creators liked the "copy protection" that the SWF package provided and game sites liked the "sandboxed" game files. If a browser could host a ZIP file and load all the assets out of it as if it was a sandboxed local directory that would be the equivalent.

Another reason for single-file distribution is the ease of installation and running. If you can run from a single executable with all resources embedded in it, then users have a very easy time of things, they just download the program, then run it.

Apple's ".app" distribution format works just like that, while allowing the developer to have a directory structure for their convenience. App stores solve the problem in other ways, but there is no good app store for the web.

It depends on how you're deploying. If you're uploading (or downloading) via a web front end (like someone else has mentioned) then obviously one file is easier. I don't recall emailing too many swf files like the twitter poster said but if you were, emailing one file is clearly easier than emailing a set of files.

Also as soon as you have more than one file you can run into path issues.

One file allows it to work offline, from anywhere which was more common.

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