In 2010 it is now possible to say that anyone who has surfed the Internet, has also used Adobe Flash Player. For those not familiar, this is the technology behind the video in youtube, many banners and the vast majority of animated games online. To put it very trivial, Flash is simply a container of elements multimedia and dynamic. Its sad business card, however, is to be substantially closed and proprietary technology.
But what has allowed Flash to earn its dominance? The first element to consider is without doubt the absence of functional alternatives for a good period of time. In fact, she was born, flash, all the alternative technologies of which we can use today did not exist. The only real competitor could perhaps be represented by java applets, but for some technical and functional characteristics, they found space only in areas which require complex calculations. Flash was then found for a long time to fill a huge, and always increasing market share, with no real competitor. Clearly, in such a scenario, the dominance of Adobe in some areas of the Web was not merely theoretical, but also to some extent inevitable.
Both Flash, Java applets, and the baby bankruptcy Microsoft Silverlight, which share some aspects in the face of modern technology, and make them unsuitable for use in an inevitable end. Everyone, in fact, are structured as a closed box to be inserted in web pages. They all need external plug-ins to function and, last but not least why slow web pages and are often unstable. It goes without saying that for every webmaster has always been a dream to do what that makes Flash without Flash. On the one hand to have pages more quickly, a source code more readable and the opportunity to work with newly installed and a browser without plug-in, the other to save on Adobe software, without which it is rather difficult to create flash content quality .
In recent years there has been a turning point: AJAX . It is not a detergent, but a technology that allows you to make any dynamic web content, using only the javascript , the scripting language used by all modern browsers. The spread of this new approach to web programming has led to rapid rise of so-called Web 2.0, and delegated to Flash content only graphically very heavy and complex. So many parts of the user interface of a website, such as buttons, menus, animated elements, visual effects, which were once made with the Adobe technology, are now made through ajax libraries (Dovers name at least two: and JQuery MooTools ).
Adobe is not left to watch and, sensing the inevitable end, he realized Flex. A meager attempt to exit the browser and web applications programs to make them in all respects. Trying to another without doubt inspired by what the competitor had already done a long time java: Java Web Start . This "newness" has nevertheless found a short and only moderately successful on mobile devices, but the consolidation of Android and iOS4 has taken away too. After the birth of GWT , also the idea of \u200b\u200bmaking web applications independent of the browser you are developing towards more modern approaches, an example to follow with interest Pyjamas Desktop .
The news that has removed any doubt remained that Flash is intended, eventually, to disappear, however, is this:
If even the same Adobe she started to work on a software that actually does what it did without Flash Flash, we can easily infer that they themselves do not believe in its survival. It must be said that even in this case the sin of Adobe creativity. In fact, the revolution that has allowed us to bring the contents of complex graphics and heavy off-overwhelming power of Flash has already happened. It can be summarized in two main elements of the new HTML5: video and canvas. The first makes it possible to play streaming video (like youtube) using only simple HTML, while the second allows you to create complex animations. There's also worth mentioning Cooties a free tool which already allows the creation animations and export them in the format canvas.
leave you with two links that show the potential of technologies set out above:
audio & video
canvas
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