The Future of Flash

An anonymous reader writes "Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash, and News.com has an article looking at the company's plans for the future of the technology. No longer just a choice for 'innovative' web designers, Adobe is positioning Flash as an application development platform, with special emphasis on video delivery and mobile device applications." From the article: "On Tuesday, the company intends to launch a microsite showing the evolution of Flash over the past 10 years, including video interviews with developers. Those videos will no doubt be played with the Flash Video Player, something many high-profile Web sites, including YouTube, have chosen to use as well. The success of Flash in the next 10 years rides largely on whether leading-edge customers like YouTube will design their Web sites with Flash, Lynch said. Adobe, which gained the Flash technology when it bought Macromedia, is trying to build an 'ecosystem' of developers and partners, he said. "

Comments

Flash FTW

[WPIDalamar]

In the past I've always classified flash as a cute toy that web designers play with to get some interactivity that consisted of timelines and hiding little snippets of code in obscure places in the timeline.

However over the past month I've been imersing myself in the Flash world and have been amazed.

Did you know...

- You don't have to use the Flash IDE to create applications, you can use:
    Eclipse (My preferred environment for this)
    FlashDevelop
    Notepad/Emacs/vi + a compiler
    A crapton of other environments
    Flex Builder (another adobe product)
- You never have to deal with a timeline if you don't want to.
- Real object-orientated programming is possible.
- Actionscript 3 (available in Flash Player 9) is clearly targetted at developers and not designers and removes many of the oddities of AS2 that you may have heard about.
- Real applications, not web toys can be created.
- With the upcomming apollo runtime, native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources.
- There's a ton of open source libraries out there
    Want an IoC container like Spring? Sure!
    Want a port of the java swing library? Sure!
- The new version of Flex Builder (the environment targetted at developers) is simply an eclipse plugin.
- Adobe is now making tools and libraries available free of charge to developers. (not the whiz-bang IDE's, but compilers, libraries, etc.)

FYI SLASH-TARDS -- What Flash can do:

[gaspar ilom]

Flash should be used where one needs to use Flash, and HTML/JS/CSS (+XML+XSLT) likewise.

Flash behaves consistently cross-browser, cross/platform -- and most features cannot be disabled by the user. (compare that to a user being able to turn off JS, or Java -- something often mandated in a corporate environment.) It's either "all on" or "all off." (w/ a few minor exceptions, eg: local storage and camera/mic access.)

Flash has a large install base. It's arguably the most widely available platform for delivering media-rich "applications" over the web.

Flash does not rely on anywhere near the number of kludges and workarounds necessary to replicate similar features -- where possible -- in different browsers and browser *versions.* (Unlike various browser technologies, supported features are more stable across updates of the Flash Player.)

Not to sound like I work for MM/Adobe, but, here's what the Flash Player can do at *run time*:

• Flash can load and play external MP3 audio.
• Flash can play video. That is not possible w/ HTML/CSS/JS.
• Flash can render text -- w/ custom-defined and packaged fonts. (not possible in a browser.) It can apply a limited set of CSS to the rendered text.
• Flash can load/parse/serialize/send XML.
• Flash can POST and GET a variety of data.
• Flash can access a user's webcam, allowing you to create your own video chat/IM app.
• Flash can programatically-build vector shapes, gradients, and fills.
• Flash can load and render external jpegs, gifs(v8), and pngs(v8) -- and in version 8, composite all that w/ vector graphics (+video?) -- *and,* sample the resulting display pixel by pixel. (w/ server interaction, you could dynamically generate graphic files.)
• Flash 8 has a "file upload" ability that goes beyond what a browser is capable of: You can multi-select upload files, filter files by type or size, and have programatic access to the state of the upload.
• Flash can animate stuff!!!
• Flash is like a 2 MB download that works in almost *every* browser out there. ...it's pretty phenomenal that all those features could have been crammed into it. (like: a built-in interpreter for a late-version-EcmaScript-compliant scripting language.)