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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. "
... "just say no".
Well, since I am on Linux and a 64 bit variant, I guess it will be another 10 years when I get to see the presentation.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
is to be made irrelevant by something else that works on all platforms and is cheaper/free/OSS.
until I realized that it looked shitty on slower computers and only had Flash 7 on x86 Linux. I can't even play FancyPantsAdventure with it. And, it can be incredibly annoying. Worst is when you force flash to use a site at all. With AJAX technologies and dynamically-created sites, is their really a need for Flash sites? I can see it for games or small applets, but for an entire site (like some car websites), do you even need it? More to the point, should you even need it?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
i booed on them right on that article
but ya flash blows
they have terrible or no support for most architectures/OSes out there
and for a 'web application' platform thats just flat out unacceptable
they did release a 32bit only version 7 for linux, but there have been what? 2 other versions and a 3rd coming since then? and none of them work on linux..
also they dont have 64bit support
and as far as i know it ONLY works on x86
so if you write your interactive web application using ajax then it works on nearly every operating system known to man.. or flash and it works only on one
Flash is in the same space as Ajax, and has been for a while. And with something like 95% browser penetration, Flash is a great way to create browser-independent websites.
Flash is far more robust and elegant than the slashdot crowd gives it credit for being. It has a powerful object-oriented language and frameworks enabling ant builds, unit testing, aspect-oriented coding, and almost every other buzzword out there. If you gave up on it 5 years ago, check it out again. It so isn't your daddy's flash these days.
Or better yet, keep insulting Flash while I keep making money off it.
The only reason that YouTube, Google Video et al adopted Flash as their video player client was because Flash is pretty much universal, and it's easier to convert videos into a Flash video file than to deal with all the compatibility issues that come with embedding a Windows Media / Quicktime / RealVideo file. Nothing wrong with that, because Flash was designed to be an animation / movie player, and moving to full motion video isn't that big of a step.
What Flash is not is an API, at least not in terms of developing complex applications. The first thing wrong with that is that Flash itself is very closed compared to open HTML. Getting a screen-reader to work with Flash is a Herculean effort that I'm pretty sure nobody has yet accomplished. The second thing is that you're basically limited to working with Flash alone as your presentation layer. Want to do AJAX-like things? Sure, but you have to do it Adobe's way or not at all. Want to have server-side execution of certain things? OK, but you have to go through Flash's weird ActionScript connection points and are limited to what Adobe has programmed into it. This will allow them to do a bunch of things to lock those already developing in Flash into staying there as moving to another environment (like, I don't know, HTML with server-side processing) would take too much effort.
Flash is great for certain things, but for complicated web applications, stick with HTML. It's already universal, you won't have compatibility issues if written well, and you can keep your animations embedded. Just keep them separate from the rest of the page. Nothing annoys me more than a website run entirely in Flash.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I spent about half an hour looking for a company's site last week. I knew the company name, but couldn't guess the URL. I'd tried a dozen searches till finally I found a forum post that linked to it. Of course, the entire front page and all navigation was in Flash, so it was totally invisible to Google's searchbot. And it didn't do anything that couldn't have been done just as easily in vanilla HTML
I've been doing Flash/AS professionally since the 5.0 days. The plattform has come a long way. For one, it actually has become a plattform, and not just some crappy IDE with a little scripting bolted on. Allthough not percieved as such, it's even closer to open source right now than Java. AS 2&3, MTASC, osflash.org and the GNU Gnash project continue to add OSS credibility and non-slashdot-bullshitting awareness in the developer community. I didn't like the hickup in the release line of the official Linux Flash Player though. If Flash won't reliably support Linux, it's a no-go for me and quite a few other serious Flash developers. The dev-laps of Macromedia where a nice place to get that straight to the devteam of flash and they got the message.
All in all it's clear that if Adope doesn't screw around to much they can't do much wrong. It's still the most widespread plattform ever with nearly zero-fuss cross plattform deployment via the web. You get a high profile independant VM, with a security model and security policy that remains unmatched in RIAs. And a rock-solid ECMA compliant OOP language along with it.
Ajax just isn't in that league. Nice for the one or other drag-and-drop gadget or small-scale data sync but that's about it.
XUL maybe will get there someday, if they get their stuff sorted out and manage to build a hassle-free XUL-Runner plugin for all major browsers. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's weird because we've been developing an application that uses Flash as a front-end and MySQL/PHP as the server-side and haven't had any issues with "connection points". Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Here's my link contribution to what I would consider "Quality Flash Work."
http://www.beautifully-webdesign.net/
The thing about Flash is that many designers and artists use it to create pieces of art, animated or dynamic in form. For these people, Flash is used to a different end than what a typical commercial or information website might use it for, which in many cases amounts to abuse of Flash.
I think it's a little hippocritical of the general slashdot user to complain about the restrictive political climate and it's often infringing acts on the creative rights of their citizens, yet dismiss Flash as a merit-less platform for art, music and other creative ideas. Somehow, I think these slashdot users are also the same people who spend too much time on sites like albinoblacksheep or newgrounds.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
As someone coding an large scale application (hint, its part of a project that is costing billions of £) that is using Flex for the presentation layer (or presentation layer + as it is turning out to be), I have to disagree.
Flex (or Flash) is an API and can be made to develop complex applications. Though the question of "complex" is debatable. I think 10s of thousands of concurrent users with 10s of millions of daily transactions will be complex enough.
I've yet to see the Ajax app that performs to a high degree of accuracy to the same extent.
Server side execution of certain things? Sure, how do you want to go about it? RPC, WS, HTTP? These are obviously all wierd Adobe programming techniques that aren't used by millions of people across the planet. We're linked upto massive multiple clusters all running various Java servlets to perform all our server side needs, such as, for example working with that massive centralised DB.
Try looking at it from a security point of view as well. Flash is prone to fewer attacks. It is much harder to spoof a Flash application, you can't simply through up a look-a-like page, you can't use simple cross site scripting attacks, no SQL injection, simply fewer common techniques will stime it.
HTML is no greater universal than Flash, Flash has different players (which can be compensated for by directing the user to get the latest), HTML has all its IE/Firefox/Opera/etc problems.
In the end, Flash CAN be annoying, if simply used to create an annoying moving image... much like a gif can be annoying if used to create an annoying moving image, but it IS powerful and will only get more so.
geez....I don't remember in the article where it stated that FLASH IS HERE TO SAVE ALL FUTURE DEVELOPEMENT AND WEB TRENDS WILL REVOLVE AROUND IT.
basically, the article is trying to set a vision of the future in which flash will play a part. Will other technolgies coexist? of course. Does Adobe have a way to go to get it right? of course. is ajax the end all? NO. does it have a way to go before its done right? of course. Are we waiting for MS to tell us which to go? NEVER.
The bottom line is, with everything in the world, the right tool for the right job. I just sent a propoasl out to a guy who is building a an online tutoring/study site that he wants to have real world eaxamples that apply algebra/calculus/physics in visual way to help students understand their basic concepts. Would I do this using HTML/XML/PHP/whatever? NO, Im going to use Flash, because I need the interactivity and animation. IF I were building a BLOG, would I use flash? no. Right tool for the right job.
both technologies can co-exist. What we need are smart developers who know when to use what technology and not just use the latest hot trend. There will always be competing technologies/languages and the devlopers that use them will always take sides. THATS HOW IT SHOULD BE! CHOICES! its what sets us apart from the animals. (and the ASM programmers!;))
As more features get added in Flash, there will be more vectors that can be used to potentially infest computers with malicious software. As it is, using Flash as an application development platform is a bad idea because nobody tends to program for security, and decides on programming for performance for media players, webcam broadcasts, video streaming, etc. As more code gets added on, holes will open up, eventually. As is the future of any piece of software - there will be a crack, hack, hole, exploit, whatever for it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm pretty sure Adobe is actively working on a Linux-compatible plugin for Flash 8 or 9, but they were going with some new technologies to do so (e.g. V4L2, ALSA). Also, GNU is actively working on a Flash player known as Gnash (or Klash for KDE), and since that's one of GNU's top priorities at the moment, we can expect a decent cross-platform Flash player which supports several different backends for renderring and playing Flash (e.g. Cairo, OpenGL, SDL, gstreamer).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
when i read ..."native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources"
well i dont have to tell you.... i hope not.
A few remarks:
- Flash 8 is the latest release, flash player 9 is available, but there is no flash authoring environment for it yet (there is a flex environment, but that's a different product).
- Flash 7 is available on linux and for most web apps it is just as capable as flash 8. My company sells flash apps, and we currently target flash player 7. Believe me when I tell you it is nothing to sneeze at.
- Macromedia chose to skip the flash 8 player for linux because they're moving their entire player codebase to gcc, so they can build players for all platforms, and didn't want to get sidetracked while doing that. They'll be releasing the flash 9 player for linux in time with the authoring environment.
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, so that users could chose to turn flash on for one page and off for another (or possibly even more granular if you wished). He told me flat out "because then our customers wouldn't like it because it would be too easy for you to avoid their ads. We want you to have a "one or the other" choice -- either all Flash or none. We think the quality of good/userful/entertaining flash out there is what makes Flash an attractive advertizing platform. If you could pick and choose what you saw, Flash would be just another rich media option on the web."
I found his honesty refreshing. And I see his point -- if you could easily pick and chose flash (as I do with the FF Flashblock extension) you'd probably never see a flash ad. I was surfing on a friends computer (on IE even) and his web experience SUCKS. Flash ads everywhere, they make noise without permission, they are ...ummm...FLASHY. And irritating. I honestly don't know how people get around with flash enabled all the time. For me if the choice is as he put it -- either no flash, or flash with no control over it, I'll take no flash.
It's silly for us to get into the arguement over whether or not content on the web should be free or supported by advertisments, because neither of us will affect the other's opinion. I don't block every ad, but if one annoys me, I do block it. I think the ad companies have the right to try to show me ads, and I have the right to try to block the ones that annoy me. So for me, I'll never consider flash an option until users have the ability to selectively choose what pages are allowed to run flash, and which flash apps are allowed to run on a given page.
Also for everyone in my company, because I block .swf at the router
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