I can already hear the Flash community cry out loud, but I’m convinced that Flash – within the next 2 years – will lose the position as the leading RIA technology for visually advanced RIAs. The technical revolution we witness with a growing number of extremely powerful JavaScript engines (Firefox, Webkit, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera) enables complex animations and drawing API features based upon open standards. These two videos show the amazing things you can do with JavaScript, HTML5 and the canvas tag already. Follow the links to the applications if you have Webkit, Chrome or Firefox 3.5+ running – although Chrome and Webkit still seam to be superior performance wise.
First, check out Guiseppe Sicari’s amazing Chrome demos, including this JavaScript 3d model of a dinosaur (the demos ran in Firefox and Safari/Webkit as well, but Firefox performance was much slower than Webkit on my OS X 10.6):
The other cool demo is from Japan, built by Satoshi Ueyama: JavaScript cloth/flag demo.
Both demos indeed show that much of what many developers think can only be done with Flash or Silverlight is achievable with JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS2/3 support in browsers. True, not all browsers have the incredible performance shown here – take the older and even the latest version of IE for example.
In that context Chrome Frame by Google is an interesting project, which was just announced yesterday:
Enable open web technologies in Internet Explorer
Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:
- Start using open web technologies – like the HTML5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
- Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.
That means, by installing Chrome Frame you can use the powerful rendering capabilities of Chrome within IE. Definitely something which will help Google with the adoption of Google Docs in companies with only IE installed on the computers.
The following screenshot shows the OpenLaszlo text shadow demo I built a bit ago, running in Chrome Frame on IE8/Windows XP:
Google Chrome Frame running my OpenLaszlo text shadow demo on Windows XP with IE8
The number of users on the web browsing with a modern, standards-compliant browser is increasing quickly. And it’s just a matter of time until you won’t have to rely on the Flash plugin to deliver visually appealing animations and 3d effects to your visitors. Technologies like OpenLaszlo can help you with the transition from still Flash-supported to completely open standards based RIAs.
Where’s the specific need for Flash in such a scenario? Video streaming, access to camera and microphone? I can imagine that there will be open standards based technologies giving us a compatible ways to stream videos into HTML pages in the near future. Good times for the Open Web!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Most of those demos are ports of older (and openly-shared) Flash work.
And not all Flash projects have seen attempted ports yet…. ;-)
I think it’s developers who will continue to innovate new projects. They’ll look for the delivery platforms that work. And it’s easier to herd one kitten into a paper bag, than it is to herd six kittens into a paper bag…. ;-)
jd/adobe
Hi Raju, nice post. I am excited about the chrome frame project, hope they’ll bring a plugin for firefox too.
@John I always wonder how you manage to comment on so many blog posts around the world – and for so many years!
To make it clear, I’m not saying that there’s no use case for deploying Flash applications in the future. And everyone has to acknowledge the incredible contributions in the field of RIAs, good browser based UIs, and state-of-the-art user experience coming from Macromedia, Adobe and the huge Flash community. The fact that neither Silverlight nor JavaFX have managed to come up with APIs for microphone or webcam access shows that Adobe is still in a good position. But then, the Microsoft WPF/Silverlight team is gigantic, I heard that around 2,5000 people world wide are working on the technology. And that’s a race a smaller company cannot win, you are not going to beat Sun/Oracle of Microsoft when it comes to plug-in or VM development in the long term.
The runtime environment for JavaScript will deliver equal performance to the Adobe Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) within 18 months. But looking at how many companies use Webkit right now (Apple, Nokia, Google, ….), and then Google Chrome on its own shows that the number of engineers developing browser based virtual machines is drastically increasing.
I wonder when we’ll see an “Export as JavaScript” menu in Flash Builder/Flash authoring tool, that would be really a step forwards. Or how about a Flash to JavaScript compiler. Has Adobe never thought of building something like a JavaScript runtime for Flex – not that I expect you to tells us something like that? Laszlo has proven that this can be done, and OpenLaszlo uses the Flex SDK internally.
If I was in Adobe’s position, I’d consider to make JavaScript the 2nd runtime for my whole suite of applications for web designers and developers.
@Angel I’m not convinced that Google will come up with a Firefox version of Chrome Frame. They need Chrome Frame for the Google Apps Premier Edition offering, as many of the businesses still have IE only installed on their machines . Those apps run without any problems on Firefox or Safari/Webkit.
Flash is not all happiness! Some things work well, some others don’t. Take the problem with Linux and unicode: FP-40 bug, 250 votes to resolve the bug – and nothing happening. That’s the sad part of the Flash story, and one wonders if Adobe made a deal with Microsoft to give as little support to Flash on Linux as possible.
Then JavaScript – a lot of promising stories, but let’s see what’s going to happen with IE in the future. Maybe the Google Chrome Frame attempt to improve IE will get the Microsoft guys going.
Hi Raju, Adobe already makes popular HTML tools… cross-version cross-browser creation tools like Dreamweaver, efficient serverside manipulation like ColdFusion, JavaScript-savvy image editing like Fireworks, many other uses. The Flash Platform is trying to complement and enhance those HTML abilities, and has its own set of creation tools optimized for that task. The Adobe tooling does support both HTML and SWF.
btw, the source code to Google Chrome Frame does reveal an NSAPI (Netscape Plugin) interface, in addition to the ActiveX Control (for MSIE/Win) more popularly discussed:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/chrome-frame-not-just-for-internet.html
jd/adobe
That is definitely true: In many of the discussions around Flash it is never said that Adobe has some very good tools for building HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications. As a tool maker it doesn’t make sense to limit yourself to one plug-in only. Most UI designers and UX experts would probably say that there’s no other company providing tools with such a good workflow integration as Adobe does. And they would be correct.
So why aren’t there equally good tools visual for building open standards based RIAs? Macromind/Macromedia/Adobe have a total of more than 20 years of experience in building timeline based animation tools (the first timeline based UI I know was the Videoworks frontend in 1985). If you would bring that experience to building Flash-like RIAs the open standards based way, that would be a valuable product. Personally I believe that – as soon as tide turns against Flash – Adobe will come up with such a tool – which I would welcome very much!
I’m aware of Adobe Spry from the first days the product was announced, and always had the hope that you’d use that complement the Flex framework, something like an Ajax runtime for Flex.
Thanks for the information on NSAPI (Netscape Plugin) support in Google Chrome Frame, that’s interesting!