The Future of Flash 468
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. "
Flash as an application development platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
The future of flash... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a Ubuntu64/Windows64 and I have to run 32-bit versions of Firefox to use flash on both OSes.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if there would be some standard cross-platform solution to do all this, and not some proprietary binary blob, compiled only for those platforms Macromedia chooses. I'm still waiting for my 8.0 Flash player for Linux.
I used to love Flash... (Score:2, Insightful)
i dissed them for lousy linux support on news.com (Score:4, Insightful)
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 old-school ajax (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Flash as an Application Development Platform? No. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Make it searchable (Score:4, Insightful)
Ajax is no 'threat' - never was. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Like it or not, Flash is here to stay.
Like it or not, some of us would like it to go away. Flash is a pestilence which has led to a lot of flashy and meaningless content clogging up web sites and making them unuseable. It's been smeared so liberally around the Web that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a site that uses it in some gratuitous fashion. No, I'm sorry -- I need to be able to go to a web site and find the information I'm looking for, not watch inane animations and pointless fluff.
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe in 10 more years I can watch it on Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not to shabby (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.beautifully-webdesign.net/ [beautifull...design.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.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
No it isn't. The "best video-on-the-web delivery platform" is a hyperlink to an .mpeg file (in terms of ubiquity and cross-platform support; in an ideal world it should be a link to an .ogg (Theora) file).
First of all, you got the French right, except for the grave accent on the 'e's: "crème-de-la-crème." And that's completely understandable, since accented characters are annoying to type unless you're familiar with the HTML entity names.
Now, as for the actual content of what you said: since when was building your own player a good thing?! I say it's actually bad, because it creates more needless duplication of effort and completely tosses out UI conventions.
Those buffering messages are standardized with good reason. And by the way: you wouldn't be seeing them at all if you just let the user download the video instead.
Re:Flash as an Application Development Platform? N (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Make it searchable (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if only we could embed Flash objects in our Slashdot posts to alleviate tinfoil-hat concerns.
Wait. Scratch that -- Very Bad Idea. Very Bad.
Re:The future of flash (Score:1, Insightful)
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!;))
The Future of Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flash FTW (Score:2, Insightful)
well i dont have to tell you.... i hope not.
Re:Flash is old-school ajax (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever try making a commercial frontend app with it? Write once, debug everwhere. As an example the two java apps I use on a daily basis, Oxygen and Eclipse both didn't work with the intel macs when they were released.
Java is wonderful for certain applications. The app I'm currently working on uses a java backend with a flash frontend. We certainly could have made it a java frontend as well, but doing that would have cost a lot more for no real world benefit and would have most likely provided an inferior user experience.
It's all about picking the most appropriate tool for the job.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like you know your French pretty well, but you're still trying to get a grasp of English
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
The "web" refers to hypertext. Hyperlinks, in fact, are what links the "web" together. Therefore, a hyperlink to a video file most certainly is "video-on-the-web!"
Besides, in some cases (e.g. Quicktime on my Mac), clicking on a video link does open it in the browser (by itself, as opposed to embedded in a web page).
Browser banner ads are an argument against embedded video, not for it! And "ease-of-use for customers" is a meaningless glittering generality.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
Re:Flash FTW (Score:3, Insightful)
- 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.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)
And how would you suggest making this work within an MVC framework? Should we just have a ton of CGI's it has to call? I prefer the stability and security of a framework and Flash cannot act as a front end in that sense. Plus a modular framework allows for quick changing of the interface and the data that it calls. Flash doubles and triples the time it takes to do that.
As a front end to a framework, flash is most definitely not an answer and even if it were, it's not a professional answer.
And need I mention that when you take into consideration that it's only installed on 2-5% of machine do not have it installed, 25% have of copys are not up to date, you are constantly playing a guessing game with your customer base.
Sticking to older CSS standards, older HTML standards and older JS standards means that you will reach your audience 99% of the time and be able to fulfill their requirements for coming to your site. Sure it won't be animated but thats not why they are there (unless its an animation site). With flash, at best you can serve 70%-90% of your customers. This is not acceptable as an application. If I had to deliver an applicatio nthat left out that many sers, management would tell me to re-engineer it. Yet somehow what you are saying is that this is completely acceptable??
Acceptable is delivery to the customer what he wants FIRST. Fashy animation comes second and if it won't work, won't fit into the framework or won't meet my needs as the web site owner or the customer, kiss it goodbye.
As such Flash is not ready for app development and won't be for a long time to come.
The Value Of The Web Arguement (Score:4, Insightful)
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, [mozdev.org] 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
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:1, Insightful)
on the video issue in particular, its amazing to hear this minority arguing the toss with plain old reality. reminds me of that Canute fellow.
As a development platform are you seriously going to tell me that ajax and co are the way to go?
they all use a bunch of different technologies that are all over the place? what about re-use? what about cross-browser issues?
what about the fact that ActionScript has fully matured and Flash is the prevailing trend?
what about the way that lots of os projects use flash; e.g. http://www.osflash.org/ [osflash.org]
while the mindless flash-bashers are looking up ubiquitous they might like to take the opportunity to check on the word solipsism and simian while they're at it.
Re:Flash as an application development platform (Score:3, Insightful)