Possible Successors to Flash-style Runtimes?

Question

I tend to believe that Flash and other proprietary, browser-based runtimes are not a good idea.

But, people seem to love them because they are pretty and offer developers a lot of power as long as they get on board with buying the tools, etc.

Does anyone see a future where such a business model doesn't exist? I think there is a great opportunity for a standards-based graphical toolset using javascript, css, and html to compete with (and preferably, for me, defeat) Flash-based tools.

What does Flash offer that can't be accomplished with the basic building blocks of the web? What would a possible successor to Flash need to tackle to seriously be a "Flash-killer?"

Answer 1

Flash is killing itself very effectively by trying to attract developers instead of designers.

EDIT: Primal reason for Flash popularity was that it was near "free form" designer mindset, where art ir the king, and code is just an anoyance one has to deal with. They are now going away from designers by trying to be attract more developers, but developers will always feel more comfortable in some more open environment like Javascript, Java, Dotnet, ...

Answer 2

Flash is a single product whether you're on Linux, Windows or Mac. Using javascript/css we already run into browser-compatibility issues. While we're forced to support the older IE versions, javascript isn't really fast enough for a lot of purposes unfortunately.

I don't think we need a "flash killer". The video element supported in the lastest browsers may help remove some of flashes dominance (for video anyway), once a few years has passed and support for video is more widespread.

Answer 3

It's not about what can't be done with standard tools. Anything can be done in any language. That's completely not the point. The point is that with Flex you can get a rich web application running in a few days' work that looks amazing and consistently on all browsers. The fact that you can theoretically achieve the same with other technologies if only they had the proper libraries and tools doesn't change the bottom line. Right now, flash/flex/silverlight/wpf all give you tons of capabilities out of the box, so that's why using them is a good idea (assuming you're looking to get things done).

Answer 4

Mozilla is trying this very hard with HTML 5 for things such as video, audio and drag&drop. However, they aren't being very successful yet since other some other browsers, including Internet Explorer and older versions of Firefox, don't implement these technologies.

As a result, I don't think Flash-like technologies(including Silverlight) will be gone soon.

Answer 5

You could take a look to Xinf. From the website:

Xinf (Xinf Is Not Flash) strives to provide a unified SVG-oriented API for graphics programming in haXe. Using Xinf, your application can run on Adobe's Flash Player (Version 9 up), our own 'Xinfinity' runtime, and (with limitations) on standards-compliant web browsers like Mozilla Firefox - from the same source code.

Most of it's cross-runtime magic is owed to the excellent haXe language and compiler and the neko virtual machine. Xinf adds abstracted implementations for rendering and user-interface events, and a cross-platform (Linux/Windows/OSX), OpenGL-based runtime environment (dubbed Xinfinity).

Answer 6

I second luiscubal and want to add that Flash & Silverlight offers extremly niceness for developers. We don't have to care about the plugin distribution. Also there is no war about standards going on.

Flash is on some serious trails that can't be done the standart building blocks. You can use shaders and graficacceleration. 3D is getting better and soon will overthrow Shockwave. Better control over text, css3 is not coming that soon ... Streaming without a os-native player needed.

It offers total control over your web / desktop project without having to fight with OS- or browser issues.

By the way: the Flex SDK is open source by now ;) You don't need to spend any money at all to develop Flash. There is also haXe. A open source compiler für as2, as3 & JS.

Flashdevelop is also an opensource program to code Flash.

Adobe is working on the designer issue. They will bring out a new program, code name Termo I think. It will be the middle man between Flex Builder & any generic Graphic program.

A successor needs only to be one thing: hip .... And maybe have more ad money than Adobe.

Genericrich: Ever looked really at svg ;)