Based on the what I observed in the rich Internet application (RIA) business in the last 5 years, Adobe Flash is a clear winner among the multiple available browser-based runtime environments. Adobe has effectively executed a move from a once proprietary ActionScript language to an open standards based ActionScript3 language (ActionScript3 and the ECMA4 draft), partnering up with with Mozilla for the Tamarin project.
The Flex SDK – including the ActionScript3 compiler – have been open sourced, Flash Player has been ported to Linux. To clarify what I mean by rich Internet applications: For me that includes multimedia support like playing MP3 and video, recording video and audio, streaming videos. None of that can be effectively done with pure open source tools, if you are trying to target a possible customer base of more than 90% of all Internet users.
The Flash Player 9 has brought us an impressive performance improvement, and Flash Player 10 has brought a bundle of new features and APIs, including low-level access to text – offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.I’ve been very skeptical of Flash as a technology until 2004, when I first saw the Laszlo Dashboard, the first rich Internet application in a sense of a component-based modern RIA, built using a traditional software development approach, integrating a workflow from design to engineering. In an interview with Sarah Allen David Temkin mentioned, that the term “rich Internet application” was coined, when Norm Meyrowitz saw the Laszlo Dashboard and Calendar demo:
“One time I had lunch with Norm Meyrowitz, who at one point was President of Macromedia, and at a later point was on a temporary leave. At that time, I had lunch with him and I showed him the Calendar and Dashboard demo applications. And he says, “this isn’t rich media… these are rich Internet applications.” To my knowledge that was the first time that phrase had ever crossed anybody’s lips — that was his thing and you can imagine that got taken back to Macromedia and that became the RIA term you still hear today.”
Since then we have seen complex and large applications being built on top of the Flash Player, the most prominent virtual machine in browser – next to JavaScript. Some of the largest applications I know are doof.com, Laszlo Webtop, g.ho.st, Timeliner, but there are many more. Back in 2002 it was hard to imagine building so large and powerful applications running inside the browswer.
Adobe and the Flash team have been working hard to turn the slow-performing Flash Player into a stable virtual machine, multiplying the performance from Flash 8 to Flash 9 my several hundred percent. But JavaScript is catching up: Webkit’s JavaScript engine shows incredible performance, and while Flash will still be the predominant runtime for larger RIAs in 2009, I expect JavaScript to dramatically catch up this year – performance wise. Multimedia integration into RIAs will be even more crucial and the future. The day when we’ll see open standards based video, audio and webcam access would change the game drastically, but I can imagine that Adobe is smart enough to be part of that discussion. HTML5, based on what I’ve read, is still far from supporting video based on open standards.
Silverlight doesn’t have the market penetration right now to threaten Flash’s position, although Microsoft is fighting an up-hill battle. JavaFX – promising, but then it’s Java again. How long does it take to launch a JavaFX application in your browser? Test for yourself with the JavaFX sample page. I personally like the syntax of JavaFX Script, but that’s a different story.
I don’t see the big competitor for Flash, although the DHTML support in OpenLaszlo makes it a lot easier to build very large and complex DHTML based RIAs. And that this point, I want to thank the Flash development team and Adobe for coming up with the Flash Player. It’s not open source, what I would prefer. But for me it’s a lot easier to build Flash applications with exactly the same look and feel accross multiple browser and runtimes, integrating multimedia elements – than it’s possible with any other technology right now.
