Going to be building these types of applications in AS3, targeting kiosks using multitouch.
I understand Starling's raison d'etre is providing a layer of abstraction when targeting the GPU.
My first question would be, is there any advantage in targeting the GPU for this type of application?
And if so, would the Starling framework be a good choice? Or is it really only useful for games?
Such as from the description of the O'Reilly free book: Introducing Starling - Building GPU Accelerated Applications description:
Starling is an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs (available on desktop in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). Starling is mainly designed for game development, but could be used for many other use cases. Starling makes it possible to write fast GPU accelerated applications without having to touch the low-level Stage3D APIs.
Most Flash developers want to be able to leverage GPU acceleration (through Stage3D) without the need to write such higher-level frameworks and dig into the low-level Stage3D APIs. Starling is completely designed after the Flash Player APIs and abstracts the complexity of Stage3D (Molehill) and allows easy and intuitive programming for everyone.
Obviously Starling is for ActionScript 3 developers, especially those involved in 2D game development; of course you will need to have a basic understanding of ActionScript 3. By its design (lightweight, flexible and simple), Starling can be used also be used for other use cases like UI programming. That said, everything is designed to be as intuitive as possible, so any Java™ or .Net™ developer will get the hang of it quickly as well.
Per GPU, clearly any visual based runtime could benefit from hardware acceleration.
This also depends on the hardware specs of your kiosk.
There are many performance considerations beyond GPU, such as leveraging stage video in your kiosk apps. You should also weigh authoring requirements within Flash Pro.
