Where next for the Flash platform?
As part of last month’s Flash Camp, .net met up with Adobe and five Flash experts to discuss the power of the community and the new challenges the platform is facing
This article originally appeared in issue 188 of .net magazine in 2009.
Andrew Shorten, Adobe: How has the business market’s perception of Flash changed?
Stefan Richter, Muchosmedia: There’s certainly a shift. I don’t work on the timeline in Flash much at all these days. Clients come to me for consultancy, whether it’s configuring servers or evaluating the Flash platform against other technologies. There are many different levels and with Flex certainly
it’s become more acceptable. It’s way beyond the banners and skip intros. If you want to make a business out of it, there are so many different levels. It comes down to what you want to specialise in.
Dave Williamson, BitTube: I think the advent of Flex Builder has opened up people’s opinions. Previously, there were a lot of preconceived ideas about what Flash is. People had this idea that it’s a banner machine, an advertising platform, a microsite thing — very limited in its capabilities. Flex Builder has changed this attitude an awful lot as banks have started to use it, and certainly Java developers are actively pursuing the use of Flex.
James Whittaker, Refreshingapps: The business used to perceive Flash as some people creating quick fancy graphics that had animation in them, things that you added on to the site to draw people to it. Flex has really opened up the game and the businesses have started to understand that it’s a proper platform now. We can do proper RIAs, we can now deliver these to the desktop as well, which we never could before. We’re getting more into an application space now rather than just brochureware sites. Where the Flash platform is going is absolutely fantastic. Businesses have started to take note and it’s definitely heading in the right direction.
Mike Jones, FlashGen: If you look at financial services and internal systems, a lot of those dashboard solutions that they had in the past were Java-based because they were spewed out from the back of the services. They delivered the information, but may not actually deliver the experience. If something works but only works good enough, then people will use and tolerate it but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right for them. With the Flex framework and the ability to then harness the Flash platform technologies to deploy to the desktop through AIR, it gives you a very clean workflow for being able to introduce that rich user interaction without actually sacrificing time, cost or functionality.
Bola Roibi, MWD: Businesses, as opposed to your typical digital agencies, are much more formalised because I guess they have got compliance issues they have to meet. They need to have a set process, which is something that to a certain extent has always been missing between the traditional digital agency work and how it fits into corporate business.
JW: I think you’re quite right there. I’ve worked on a financial enterprise Flex application and the company wanted to be the first to market with
an RIA and we chose the Flash platform to do it. The way it was actually built wasn’t with a creative workflow at all. It was very, very structured. It was done with Agile development methodologies.
AS: A key part of moving the platform on is the community. What inspires you in the community?
DW: I don’t know whether the Flash community is unique as I’ve never heavily been involved in other communities but it’s certainly so enthusiastic. It’s prepared to just have a go at stuff and isn’t afraid to fail. The open source Flash movement, for example, shows how fearless a lot of Flash developers can be. Maybe some would say it’s blindly fearless but actually an awful lot of good comes out of it. The work that goes into things like Papervision, these are things that are driven by the community’s blind drive into accomplishing something. The results are incredible.
MJ: Just recently I was doing some work with a company and they showed me one of their layout planning tools for magazine publication and it’s all built in Flex. They have their own version of Flash Media Server that they wrote on the back of it. It’s truly astounding to see this product. If it didn’t have a web browser chrome around it, you would just make the assumption that this was a real hardcore desktop application, and that’s not taking away from the technology and the implementation. You just see this thing and think that’s just too cool.
AS: Inspiration can come not just from whizzy graphics or rich UIs but also from the quality and the stability in which something’s produced.
JW: Back in the day there was a lot of crazy Flash stuff with really small fonts, some attempted applications you really couldn’t use. I think we’ve evolved and picked up some really good stuff from other companies that have done hardware and software. Flex as well has given us a good platform to begin a really good experience in applications. The Fiat Eco Drive, for example, is a complete proper application with all the nice design stuff but there’s an awful lot of things going on behind the scenes.
SR: The tool itself has so many levels. All of us here do something different with it, whether it’s mobile or Flex components or AIR apps. I’ve worked with Flash as far as I can remember and I’ve probably just touched half of it, probably not even that. It’s a real Swiss army knife and you get all these creative people who see it as something different. Nobody has the same perspective. I think that’s what makes the community so unique. I don’t know any other tool with that sort of depth to it.
BR: Do you think there’s a type of person that suits the Flash community?
DW: At Flash on the Beach last year they asked how many people came from a standard computer sciences background and quite a few hands went up. Then they asked how many people came from a creative background and it was about 90 per cent of the people. There’s this drive for creativity in what we do, even if we put it in a text editor. It’s almost like asking a kid ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’ and they say ‘I’d love to work at Legoland’. Twenty years later here I am working in Legoland building stuff every day.
MS: I think that you’ll probably find that the vast majority of people who are Flashers all really got off on Lego or Meccano if you’re as old as I am. Because you have to have a slightly analytical perspective to be able to visually see and hold that mental form in your head and extrapolate it out. You also have to have a very creative leaning because you’re talking about creating something that is inherently visual. I think we are fast approaching a point where the Flash platform may start to resemble the Java platform in the sense that people will start to specialise in particular routes. You start off being a generalist and then you start to focus on a specific area based on the career path you want to follow.
AS: Where you want the platform to go next?
SF: I’m passionate about the real time aspect. A lot of other technologies haven’t really grasped what having real time features can do to an application. Adobe is suggesting an order form, for example, and that’s great but again it’s about convincing the people higher up the chain. Who’s actually going to change their whole ordering process or that checkout page to a Flash page? At the same time, those people that recognise the ideas that can be had will be the first to benefit from it.
DW: For me the most important thing is borne out of what I’ve been doing the last two years around mobile. I’m not able to use AS3 or Flex,
or any of these fun powerful systems. The fragmentation across devices of the player and platform is the biggest barrier for me and I want consistency of the platform, consistency of the way it updates and consistency of the APIs.
JW: I’m coming from the AIR side, and it’s great where it is now on the desktop but it also has a lot of limitations on the desktop. As soon as
we hit devices as well and developers can start developing apps and sites that are going to work on mobile and on the desktop and do all these fabulous things with integrating with other programs lower down in the systems – that’s going to open up a whole new world than just Flash inside the browser.
MJ: I like to see the Flash platform on everything but there needs to be some form of consistency across the board for that to happen. We as a community and as a technology are mature enough now to be able to make decisions over whether the code execution is going to crush a person’s system and we don’t need the Flash player to step in and tell us that.
This article originally appeared in issue 188 of .net magazine in 2009. Photography by Andy Short
