Is jQuery forcing Adobe ColdFusion to abandon the dead flash product line?

Question

I have been reading a lot about how flash development/design had died, and as jQuery and in the near future html5 comes out, will this start to push Adobe/Coldfusion away from flash towards less product linking?

I mean, I love coldfusion, and want that to continue to grow, however, if Adobe only bought Coldfusion from Macromedia, so they can bundle flash and coldfusion together, does the death of flash mean the death of coldfusion?

http://topnews.us/content/221385-jobs-says-adobes-flash-waning-and-had-its-day

http://aext.net/2010/03/javascript-jquery-killing-flash-tutorial-jquery-plugin/

I really don't mind if Flash dies, I do mind greatly if coldfusion does.

Is the success of Flash linked to Coldfusion? If so, why? or why not?

The purpose of this isn't to start some war about flash pro's and con's. I was only worried that Adobe would cause problems for Coldfusion, if flash had some market/financial problems.

That was my main concern...

And no I am not anti-flash...

But my financial sanity depends on Coldfusion being a success, so that is why I stated my question. Because I WANT EVERYONE ELSE'S OPINION OF THIS SITUATION.

Thank You.

Answer 1

It's funny that you've only chosen the negative articles to post here. There are a number of articles refuting the argument that "Flash is Dead" that have been posted over the past couple of months, and I'm sure they're much more informative than anything I'd write up quickly for stack overflow.

So anyway, HTML 5 does not do the same thing as flash - true, it should eventually be able to deliver web based video, but HTML is not expected to be a W3C Recommendation until 2022 (It'll be a release canidate in 2012, but the big clients tend to be cautious adopters). That's a long way off.

Secondly, JQuery's been able to do all that stuff posted in that link for a while now, it hasn't 'killed' flash yet. Flash is just one of many tools that clients choose to use for a job, and it's frequently chosen because it's quick to produce and there's a lot of talent out there that prefers to work in flash. It's also (if well developed) a consistent experience across browsers and operating systems. I think Flash has gotten a bad rep from it's use as a banner ad creation tool, and it's ease of use (it's easy to create a site - much harder to learn to optimize properly).

Anyway, read this: http://jamie.kosoy.net/2010/04/re-thoughts-on-flash/ http://jessewarden.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-on-flash-correcting-the-lies.html

or less seriously: http://polygeek.com/2256_flex_flash-not-dead-yet-but-html5-is-still-born

Anyway, it's really just some weird Apple - Adobe PR thing, not really the truth, but I think it's great to see HTML and javascript developing even further (I just hope it doesn't mean we start getting jquery banner ads).

Answer 2

See my comment on your question (the question should be community wiki & may be closed as not programming related)... but for grins, I'll bite.

ColdFusion is in no danger of being cut off; least of all from any failures of the Flash platform. Quite the contrary to what you hint at, Adobe continues to invest boatloads of money into Flash and Flex -- see recent developments with Flash Player 10.1, including a mobile-optimized runtime that will run on pretty much every platform except the iPlatform. Creative Suite 5 was just released, including Flash Professional, a significant investment to be sure. Then there's Flex, which won't run without the Flash runtime, but also continues to be invested in, as seen with the recent release of Flash Builder 4 (the successor to Flex Builder 3).

Aside from what is going on in the Flash platform (a client-side platform), ColdFusion (a server-side platform) just released version 9, and has a roadmap out through version 11, and Adobe just shipped a new IDE for developing with the language (CF Builder). One of ColdFusion's many strengths is in being the glue that brings together all sorts of other technologies. It integrates with Exchange, pop/smtp/imap, Sharepoint, .Net assemblies, Java, LiveCycle, BlazeDS, Solr, (and the list goes on and on) natively, as well as providing gateways to interact with XMPP, SMS, and more or less anything else you could possibly think of.

While there are some ties between the platforms, for example: using Flex Data Services in Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 is easiest with ColdFusion, I don't really see what one has to do with the other, at least in terms of the failures of one affecting the success of the other.

It makes a lot of sense for Adobe to make two of their products work better together than either of them work with anybody else's products. That drives adoption and sales of one based on the other -- it's just smart business.

But no, the success of ColdFusion does not depend on the success of the Flash Platform.

Answer 3

I have to put an "answer" to this silly question :)

I worked couple of years in Flash, couple of years with Flex, and now almost 2 years with various js libraries... AS2.0 had it's downsides and problems, Flex indeed has it's mega-stupid bugs and bad written components, however jQuery and it's little UI sister have sooooooooo much to learn, first from extJS and then from Flex and Flash...

Answer 4

It strikes me that the title of the question and the actual question you're asking are two different things. The title is asking if jQuery is forcing ColdFusion to abandon Flash, and the body of the question is assuming Flash's death and asking if this in turn spells doom for ColdFusion. I'll address them separately.

First, is jQuery killing Flash/forcing ColdFusion to abandon it? Well, to start, as some have said, there's nothing really to say the Flash/Flash development is dead. Certainly it's seen better days, but I certainly don't have a clear expectation of what's going to happen to it. Could ColdFusion at some point abandon Flash integration? I suppose it's possible. Look what happened with ColdFusion's Java applet support - no one uses it anymore, so they stop making functionality that uses it. I think you'll continue to see the ColdFusion product line strive to provide developers with the best possible delivery methods currently available.

Second, if Flash dies does ColdFusion die with it? My opinion: absolutely not. It may affect some of the feature set (a lot of the newer features of CF are to streamline integration with Flex), but killing ColdFusion? I don't think so. I think Flash's existence or popularity is ultimately irrelevant to the ColdFusion product line. I could be wrong - I have no stats to back this up - but frankly I feel that the VAST majority of ColdFusion development is for straight HTML web apps and basic sites, or at the very least, not primarily for Flash or Flex. Even if it is, most of it exists as a service layer to power a Flash/Flex front-end. This in the end is a developer choice in how to deploy a product. Regardless of the delivery you can still power it with ColdFuion. As far I can tell they have no real impact on each other.

Answer 5

You're asking a meaningless question. If the sky falls down, will it make ducks drown?

Flash makes Adobe lots of money, and has a big community; it wont die.

Even when a complete usable HTML5+CSS3+JS1.9+jQuery combo arrives in all significant browsers -- even if it ends up do everything Flash does and more -- there will almost certainly still be enough Flash fans that prefer their tech, and existing Flash/Flex apps to keep it profitable for Adobe to keep it going.

(Just like there's CFML, C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc - we might not "need" lots of languages, but each one has enough supporters to keep it going, and the same will be true if/when all Flash's unique features are implementable direct in the browser.)

But anyway, despite all that, if Flash was suddenly stopped, probably the only impact on ColdFusion would be that Adobe might stop all the damned Flash marketing at the CF conferences!
And that alone is reason to wish for its speedy demise. ;)