Part two of the Prince McClean Adobe-Flash history. Excellent history involves Adobe SVG, Microsoft VmL-XAML-Silverlight, Apple WebKit, Sun (Java) as they battle for dominance over web applications and the future of the Web itself.

Tags: svg, ria, flash, adobe, java, javascript, webkit, air on 2008-06-18 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Two areas where Flash can offer real value is in displaying and packaging video on the web, and in serving as a Java replacement for developing applets. Here's a look at how Adobe is working to defend its strengths in the face of competition, and how its efforts to open the Flash specification in the Open Screen Project play into these efforts.
proprietary FLV video container format
more advanced and open H.264 video codec
Apple's ability to disrupt the status quo in video playback is evident in its deal with Google to vend YouTube videos to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV as straight H.264 rather than Google's existing mix of a Flash-based player and its archaic GVI file format based upon AVI.
As Apple's hardware-based H.264 playback in mobile devices begins to define how to reach affluent customers with content, Flash will increasingly lose any allure on the PC desktop as well, as developers won't want to target PCs and mobiles using two different systems.
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- Wow. What an insight. If Apple can push Flash aside with the open standard H.265, they will perhaps do the same to Adobe RiA (AiR-Flex-Flash) with the rapidly emerging WebKit-SproutCore JavaScript library!
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-06-18
Adobe seems to be hoping that nobody notices these problems and that its vigilant marketing efforts can entrance the public into thinking that a drawing app extended into an animation tool and then retrofitted into a monstrous hack of a development platform is a superior technology basis for building web apps compared to the use of modern open standards created expressly to promote true interoperability by design rather than retroactively.
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- Here's one for the mighty marbux and the Universal Interoperability Council! If Adobe and Microsoft are successful with their proprietary RiA approaches for creating highly interactive, dynamic web applicaitons, they will break the Open Web. If Apple and Google succeed with their open standards - open source RiA approach (WebKit-SproutCore-GWT), the future of the Web will be open. Where is the UiC on this? Hummmm?
  posted by garyedwards on 2008-06-18

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Flex/Flash: About Singleton, Threads and Flex | Blogging about Software Development

Flex applications are, like Flash applications, compiled into an SWF file. Once a user visits the webpage containing your Flex application, the SWF file is downloaded to and run from the client computer. Instead of a seperate session each user receives their own copy of your Flex application. The client computer runs the Flash VM, which in turn fires up the local copy of your Flex application.

Furthermore, Flex uses the Actionscript scripting language. The current version is Actionscript 3. Actionscript 3 is single-threaded. By now you probably already see where this is going. The single-threaded nature of Flex applications means synchronization is not required.

Tags: flex, flash, java, swf on 2008-06-12 -All Annotations (0) -About

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