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 as an application development platform

[thrillseeker]

... "just say no".

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[truthsearch]

A technology shouldn't be thrown away just because you don't like how some choose to use it. Some people use cars to run over others, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of all cars. Blame the web site owners, not Flash.

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[IAmTheDave]

Right, but there's almost no SVG adoption.

On the Flash side, flash's serious, serious advantage is one of its most recent - it's really the best video-on-the-web delivery platform available. It's almost ubiquitos distribution, and cross-platform support is the tops.

Then there are other advantages - Flash has a brilliant, mature buffering mechanism that can be programmatically controlled.

And the creme-de-la-creme (that's TOTALLY spelled wrong I'm sure) is that you can build your own player! For instance, at my last job, we built a player that would actually detect dropped packets, missing files, etc - handle everything brilliantly. For larger files, we could run a small proprietary animation instead of stupid buffering messages in QT or WMP - and if the buffer were too slow or suddenly dropped, that could all be handled programmatically. Oh - and the video compression was on par with QT or WMP.

All that was done with Flash 7. Flash 8 and especially 9 add fantastic video-speicific features that weren't in 6 or 7.

Video is where Flash shines so brightly above the competition. I mean - I love QT HD trailers of movies at 400mb, but Flash video on the web is Flash's major advantage right now, and doing video in any other format is really pointless.

(Note: Most companies are picking up on this too - YouTube and Google Video for one, but ESPN moved all their stuff as well, as did ABC (owns ESPN) etc.)

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[bunions]

SVG has several disadvantages as well that no one ever seems to mention:

• No support for video or audio. I know SVG is a vector -graphics- format, but when you compare it to flash you have to compare it with all of flash.
• No support for -any- kind of gui widgets. Want to make a radio button? You have to draw it from graphics primitives and provide all the logic (rollover effects, press effects, callbacks, etc). Hell, there's not even built-in text wrapping (it's in the 1.2 spec, I believe, but no one is even talking about the possibility of making a 1.2 viewer)
• And when you DO make those widgets, oh god, they are slow as a butt.
• No animation timeline support. This is kind of a pain in the butt in a lot of applications. You can roll your own, but that's just more work on top of the previous item.
• Incomplete implementations. The Adobe SVG plugin is pretty buggy (and I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fix it), and the Firefox implementation is still incomplete: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html

And that's just what's on the top of my head now.

I was a big fan of SVG when it came out. But I'm just not seeing it as a popular success in the long run, not without a ubiquitous viewer shipped with IE. My view is that SVG will follow in the path of VRML - still a success in some niche markets, but forgotten by most.

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[mrchaotica]

I'd agree, but put yourself in the position of someone who wants to, for instance, not simply give away their movie over the internet. Simply linking an .mpeg may not really be the solution to all your problems.

In that case, your problem is simply that you don't understand the nature of the Internet. The only way to not distribute something is to -- wait for it -- not distribute it!

In other words, even if you use Flash you're still giving away your movie because there's no way to stop the person at the other end from making a copy that they can keep. In fact, there's even a Firefox extension expressly designed for this purpose. If you think Flash will stop distribution, you're just fooling yourself.

And it's good that you can build your own player because if Macromedia won't make a player for your OS, you're free to.

Okay, you're talking about something completely different than I thought, apparently. In your previous post I thought you meant implementing a custom video player UI in Flash, that would run in a Flash player. But now you appear to be talking about implementing a modified version of Flash Player itself such that it would be a stand-alone application capable of running on platforms that Flash (as distributed by Macrom^WAdobe) doesn't support (which doesn't make any sense to me). Which is it?

Re:Flash as an application development platform

[jsebrech]

That's exactly what SVG is supposed to be for -- and it has the distinct advantage over flash in that it can be integrated with that "HTML/DHTML/AJAX/whatever" stuff you mention.

You seem to be mistaken about what SVG and flash are for. I've built a web-based CAD app before, and ended up implementing a combination of the two. Comparing SVG to flash is like comparing HTML to PHP. Flash is good for run-time manipulation of vector graphics, but it is lousy at vector graphics exchange (since you can't edit an swf). SVG excels at vector graphics exchange, but the cross-browser support for run-time manipulation is virtually non-existant. I ended up building an SVG editor in flash, which is a sensible combination when you look at the strengths of each.

Anyway, I know a lot of people here hate flash, so as an ajax and flash developer, let me be burst a few bubbles:

• Flash is an amazingly capable web app development platform. It is a lot more easy to develop complex web apps in than ajax (regardless of your choice of ajax toolchain). Some things are just not feasible with any alternative (like exact control over printing without forcing a costly round-trip to the server to generate a PDF). It is not an accident that yahoo's new maps and google finance are built in flash.
• There is an open source toolchain for flash development (built around eclipse, swfmill and the open source mtasc actionscript compiler). Currently only the player is not open sourced, and that could be easily reimplemented since the swf format is fully documented.
• Flash integrates well with HTML/JS/PHP/... There is a javascript to flash bridge, and so you can build a web app that is a mixture of flash and javascript. My CAD app has a HTML-based toolbar, and a flash content area. Interacting with PHP is a matter of either using the built-in XML classes, or using the AMFPHP framework, which lets you transmit wholly-formed objects between flash and PHP without having to do any parsing in between.
• Flash is at least as easy (or difficult) to build accessible apps in as AJAX, since AJAX has all the same downsides of flash when it comes to accessibility, and unlike flash it doesn't have an accessibility API to make up for it.
• There are frameworks out there for building desktop apps with flash. It's straightforward to build a web app and a desktop app that share the same codebase.

Flash is to much of a Hog.

[jellomizer]

No Flash for me, It takes way to much bandwidth what I do is make each frame and save it as a bmp and use JavaScript to load each frame by frame, It saves a load on bandwidth! Vs. Piggy Flash

Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux

[charnov]

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.

Flash is my second favorite...

[Overzeetop]

...right after the blink tag.

i dissed them for lousy linux support on news.com

[Intangion]

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

[night_flyer]

a-aaaaa! He'll save every one of us!

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.)

Re:Flash FTW

[WPIDalamar]

Seen a bunch more misconceptions in posts all over the site, so here's an addendum to my list:

- Full accessibility, including screenreader support, is built into Flash. To utilize that is about as difficult as implementing that support for a traditional desktop application. There is no need to have weird hacks.

- Actionscript is the language the flash player is the environment it runs in (the VM?) and it provides an API that is fully accessible from actionscript without touching adobe design tools.

- Flash has it's own control panel for privacy concerns that rivals most browser controls (not counting addons) for html content.

- Just because there are crappy flash things out there (animated ads, stupid games, etc.) doesn't mean real applications can't be built. You don't blame C for the latest internet worm, why blame flash for the latest annoyance.

- It can be indexed by search engines.

- The new target is at full blown applications. Think of something like iTunes. An application running on your computer that communicates extensively with online services. With an added bonus it can be delivered on-demand over the internet in addition to a traditional download/install or cd/install.

- Macromedia dropped the ball on linux flash player. Adobe's picking it back up.

Ajax is no 'threat' - never was.

[Qbertino]

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.

Can they really celebrate...

[pla]

A decade of a product they just recently purchased?

Macromedia made flash ubiquitous on the web, like it or not.

Then Adobe-come-lately appears on the scene, and we start getting "flash bugs"; every single site requests local storage; Flash causes more browser crashes than ever...

Sorry, Adobe, but you don't get the credit here. The profits, yes, but no Kudos for you!

Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Future of Flash?

[Khyber]

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.

Re:Flash is old-school ajax

[Bogtha]

Flash is far more robust and elegant than the slashdot crowd gives it credit for being.

As an application development platform? Sure, why not. As a web application development platform? No chance.

The fundamental problem with Flash is the same as it ever was. You have a presentation format that wraps up presentation, scripting and content into one binary bundle that couples everything together so tightly it's impossible to decompose. You might as well stick a Powerpoint presentation on the web. Virtually all of Flash's other problems that people complain about are merely symptoms of this one underlying design flaw.

With a normal web application, you can do all kinds of things with the various pieces. On a slow connection? Turn off the graphics. Indexing content? Just parse the HTML. Security worries? Switch off scripting. Hate the design? Use a user stylesheet. Missing a feature? Add it with Greasemonkey. Concerned with a particular part of the web application? Link directly to it.

Flash either makes these things impossible or way more difficult than they should be because everything is tightly coupled instead of loosely coupled the way all the other web technologies are. By itself, this single factor limits interoperability, which is the whole basis for the WWW's strength. Sure, you might be able to produce a fancy interface, but you're doing it at the expense of cutting off ties to the rest of the web's technologies. It's Flash's fundamental design flaw that Adobe/Macromedia don't seem to understand or care about fixing.

Ajax, on the other hand, works with all the other WWW technologies. It doesn't invent its own way of representing content, it uses HTML. It doesn't have its own layout system, it uses CSS. Its constituent components already all exist, and, more importantly, lots of other software is built to manipulate them.

For example, if I have my browser set up to automatically make tables sortable, this works with tables in an Ajax application because Ajax applications would just use a normal, standard HTML table. The same thing hasn't got a chance of working in Flash because it doesn't build on top of existing technologies, it throws them all away and does its own thing.

Flash isn't a way of creating web applications. It's a way of creating traditional applications and making them appear in a browser window. If that's what you want, then fine, go ahead and do that. But don't pretend they are web applications, because they've thrown away everything that makes the web so powerful and replaced it with something else.

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.)