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Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL!
First time accepted submitter lars_doucet writes "I am a 15-year Flash veteran and nobody hates to say this more than me: Flash is dying, and the killer is Adobe. Where to now? HTML5 doesn't help me with native targets, and Unity is proprietary just like Flash was — 'don't worry, we'll be around forever! And so sorry about that neglected bug report — we're busy.' I'm putting my bets on OpenFL, a Haxe-based, fully open-source implementation of the Flash API that might just please both Flash refugees and longtime Flash haters alike. My article discusses my experiences with it and gives a brief overview for newcomers. In short: I can keep making Flash games if I want, but with the same codebase I can also natively target Win/Mac/Linux desktops, mobile, and more, without having to mess with Adobe AIR or other virtual machines."
Is that a good thing?
Because, you know, this is slashdot. We won't believe something is dead until netcraft reports it...
morcego
Flash is no more native than HTML5. At this point it doesn't make sense to "place bets" on Flash at all, unless like the article author you've spent many years on Flash and are not interested in change.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
HTML5 is dead, Long Live ________! Hard to keep up.
Flash was one of the few holdouts of the Plugins era of the Netscape vs. IE Browser War. It came out because There wasn't a standard between the two for vector based graphics.
Flash worked in different browsers and across many different OS's so it got well accepted. Then Adobe for the most part didn't let go easily and created more and more stuff to it, to make it rather full featured, killing off Active X and Java Applets for standard web pages.
That said. HTML 5 is not perfect, however it does give us a lot of features that we think we should use flash for, and we really should follow the standards that comes part of the browser then rely on plugins.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How is openflash supposed to more secure than adobe flash?
How do we know this isn't an NSA front organization?
Die you bastard die!!!
How can we make sure it doesn't come back from the dead. Zombie Flash.
Take off and nuke Adobe headquarters from orbit... It's the only way to be sure.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It looks like if you don't want to deal with Flash, you have basically two options: Qt's QML for non-web-pages or HTML for web-pages.
Soon though, thanks to QMLWeb, you'll be able to use QML-to-JS in the browser.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It seems a lot of people either didn't RTFA or are basically misunderstanding what OpenFL is. OpenFL is NOT an open source version of the flash Flash Plugin, like Gnash. OpenFL is a code library written in Haxe. You use OpenFL, and then you can output a truly native (C++) app, but can still use the flash API. It doesn't embed the flash player, or Adobe AIR, or anything like that, in your generated C++ app. You can use this to create truly native apps for mac/windows/linux/mobile, etc. Very recently they've added the ability to output to HTML5: http://www.openfl.org/blog/201... So you can take your old flash code, port it to Haxe, and then have a 100% Javascript based HTML5 game. And you can take that same Haxe code and make a native C++ app with it. And so on. Hope this helps demystify things.
Apple's footprints were found at the crime scene.
Therefore every asshole on this site will shout you down no matter what you actually wrote in the article. They don't even know why they hate Flash. They just join in because it's the latest "I are programmer" meme. (The last programmer to attempt to post anything useful on this site left ten years ago)
Never mind that Flash has been responsible for tens of billions of dollars in economic value.
Never mind that from 1993 to date, Flash is the only technology that has provided attractive animation and video on the web.
Never mind that the loudest and most obnoxious anti-Flash assholes have had TWENTY ONE YEARS to come up with a viable alternative, and so far they've produced nothing but bullshit-coated bullshit.
Never mind that in 2014, we STILL don't have decent HTML5 authoring tools. Oh sure, it's built in to tools that output everything else + HTML5, but HTML5 itself? Nope. Nothing even remotely close to Flash CS6.
Never mind that in 2014 HTML5 still doesn't have decent synchronized sound support.
Never mind that the way problems like this used to get solved would be that web developers (Andressen, Joy, Davis, Clark, Yang) would get together and solve them. Now people just bitch, wipe their ass on the tablecloth, bitch some more and go back to their bong.
Awww, you can't mod it down. Guess you'll have to grow up and face the facts. Lazy, illiterate, talentless, worthless ASSHOLES are all that's left in this hate-machine cult. Go back to your fucking LoL Twitch feeds.
Flash was bad from the start and html5 and what not is just an extension of the same bad idea imo.. It is literally flash(sparkly) at the expense of function and another avenue for security exploits.
Youtube? I use a downloader app, keep local copies of anything remotely interesting.
Since ebay started using html5ucked, it takes many times longer to view the same content. All that impage overlapping crap. Before, you'd middle-click an item, middle click image after image and all are loaded for quick detailed viewing.. Now you must hover over the image, click it, then right click and open to view the actual full resolution.
Function over form you retarded punk developers.. Mind you if they didn't use all the new crap just for new sake, they wouldn't like be able to do their job or be unemployed since it would be all 'done/working'.
Just like before when I saw Macromedia let Flash kill Director and Shockwave.
Damn shame. It was such an awesome product.
FYI, Director's Lingo looks a whole lot like today's Lua.
Cheers to those of us who helped make it and those of us who took it and used it to start a great career.
I miss Director.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Flash became dominant because it filled many real needs. Vector graphics is just one. It also brought creation tools so artists could work with it, it brought a scripting environment fast enough to use in a browser. Like you say, it also brought commonality to all the different browsers. This means that Flash brought a lot of features to the masses:
- browser games. These were known as Schockwave or Flash games.
- usable online multimedia. Yes there were video sites, but they became far more usable and reliable with Flash video.
- rich design. As much as we hate them for all their inherent problems (and I do too), the fact is that before HTML+CSS caught up the only way to implement a crazy design was with Flash.
- rich typography. We've only got proper font support very recently. That means the website can define its own font, not simply choose among the handful of Web fonts one could assume were available on the client.
Yes you could do video with native plugins like WMPlayer. Do you remember how terrible that was? Half the videos wouldn't play because of some unknown problem with codecs or such. When FLV came in it was great. Despite its problems, it brought reliability. I don't think YouTube would have become as successful as it is without Flash. Same with audio.
Despite its many problems, Flash brought a rich, standard interface to the web when nobody else could.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
I have used downloader apps on youtube, but it seems they work for a few weeks then stop working. Update, then try again, still hit and miss getting a clean download. What are you using that provides consistently good downloads?
An open flash clone might be ok because it does not matter that it will not run on the devices most of the world are going to be using in the near future. These app can be legacy, like the stuff that requires IE. But it is just like Java which has fallen 25%. People will figure out how to make HTML5 work, and work better, so they can access as many customers as possible.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Can OpenFL handle something like Stage3D and wrappers like Starling?
I've used Haxe in the past, but found it lacking in support of things like sound and sprite animation for writing mobile games.
It's really not.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It is more cross platform than anything else out there. :/
With an asm.js optimized browser, it is also very competitive, performance wise.
In that respect you could probably impliment openFL in emscripten
No installation required.
If you download “Google Chrome” as opposed to “chromium” for linux, from Google, it has a completely up to date flash plugin built in. It installs with a right click in Debian, and is easy to add to any distro that you're making ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
OpenFL is a code library written in Haxe. You use OpenFL, and then you can output a truly native (C++) app, but can still use the flash API. It doesn't embed the flash player, or Adobe AIR, or anything like that, in your generated C++ app.
So is this a possible migration path for those who were using Adobe AIR? If it's C++, could it tie in with Apple's ObjectiveC framework and thus create deployable apps in the Mac App Store?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
As long as employers (game devs, in particular) are willing to keep paying people to write it, I'm pretty sure it's going to stay popular.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Read the article. You're commenting on something completely unrelated. This isn't about creating an insecure alternative to the Flash plugin.
So, how does OpenFL replace Flash, I was pretty sure that Flash's main competitor was memristors.
Doesn't anyone remember back when native code was considered dead? This was all worked out. There were 2 major, well developed VMs, or JITs, Java and Dot Net. Why bother with anything else?
As for the unemployed Flash authors, wasn't the ubiquity of Flash a large part of its appeal? Why should the general public get used to some new, unknown thing, when there is JVM and Dot Net? Flash is over. Get over it. Learn something else.
No, they don't. They only support mobile features and resizing the interface to the pixel count of the screen. They're fucking murder on people with poor vision and other adaptations.
this place looks like trash now. is this slashdot web 2.0?
It been a fun ride but it needs to go. The use of Flash is preventing more open technologies like HTML5 from moving forward in order to support all what Flash used to do.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
It will be better for everyone concerned if you do, citizen.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Indeed, instead of using a plugin, author it in OpenFL and "compile" it as JavaScript. You get the nice Flash API and can use the Flashdevelop IDE if you want, without needing the Flash plugin.
C is probably the most cross platform language, with Fortran being another possibility
Title: "Flash is dead"
Summary: "Flash is dying"
TFA: "Flash is getting hard to deal with compared to other approaches"
...the sooner it dies, the better.
"Never mind that Flash has been responsible for tens of billions of dollars in economic value."
Presumably you're talking about the economic cost of all those Flash-player exploits over the years?
Dart with stageXL
According to them this game was ported in 6 hours.
Hi. I'm a tablet. I don't run flash. I'm a huge, huge part of the web traffic out there. My cousin the phone is also a huge part. He also doesn't run flash. So regardless of what flash brings to the table, people have begun to move on. Because I'm that important.
I sense you don't really have a grasp of the ideal use case for something like OpenFL. The real power in a cross-platform library like this is the ability to compile the same codebase to different targets. Say I have a game, I want to compile it for web, desktop, and mobile, in all their various flavors. I could write a native desktop version in C++, an iOS version in C++/Obj-C, an Android version in Java, and a web version in Flash or HTML5. Great now I've wasted a ton of time and I have 4 separate codebases to support. Or I could write my game in OpenFL, and simply deploy it to the right targets with some minor tweaks.
OpenFL isn't a "way to avoid learning new technology." It's a productivity tool for people who want to build cross-platform applications without re-writing the same code four or five different times. Cross-platform tools are going to become more and more common as time goes on, this is one option, and it looks like a pretty good one.
Sure does. Compiles to C++, Java, C# for compilation.
It sure does. There's a bunch of libraries for WebGL, Stage3D style stuff.
Hey Beta isn't worse than the standard interface (posted from beta).
slashdot admins: If you want beta to have greater use maybe lower the AC limits when using it
Which of the problems that we have with Flash does this solve?
The proprietary format? Does this stick to W3C standards?
The need to download and install a plugin? Does this not need anything installed?
The moving, flashing ads? Does this prevent animation? Built in ad blocker?