Unfit For Print

Is there hope for Flash?

Posted by Ben Jackson Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:34:00 GMT

I recently spoke with a former teammate from one of my old Flash development contracts. I asked him what he's working on lately:

personally i don't play with flash anymore
the last app i coded was 6 months ago
uh, and my stress level decrease a lot now ;)

He's not alone. Jonas Galvez, the guy who literally wrote the book on Flash in Brazil, hasn't touched it in over a year.

Both of them are now spending most if not all of their time working with Rails, pecking out Ruby, Javascript and CSS like monkeys on speed.

Exodus

I've seen quite a few of my colleagues give Flash the boot. And don't even get them started on Flex [translated from Portuguese]:

...it's impossible, or at least impractical, to produce Flash applications in MXML which follow commonly defined visual requirements. Flex is a tool to create HTML-like applications, and that's it.

It's sufficiently simple to use and understand for a cubicle programmer (who doesn't really understand HTML/CSS, and depends on VisualStudio or Dreamweaver). For some select few types of interface, it can cut programming time, with the downside of only running on the Flash Player, being based on a non-standard language, having a notable limitation on resources and adding enormous difficulty when the need arises to extend functionality.

Why is there such a strong backlash against the "Flash Platform"? Some thoughts:

• It's extremely difficult to push even a reasonably simple site into production for a beginner. Usually new AS programmers start to get the hang of things on the 3rd or 4th site they put up. When you're working in HTML, you don't have to worry about your images getting distorted because you didn't set the registration point properly, or about hanging the browser because you tried to load 100k of XML with a single request. Some tasks (like sharing fonts efficiently across movies) are so non-intuitive that an entire business can be built around the lack of proper documentation.

• There is no real HTML or CSS support in Flash. Yeah, there's a half-baked implementation of CSS in there which helps some, but nothing close to what Claus Wahlers was able to accomplish with Flash 6 and AS1.

• Compiling takes time. Even with MTASC and a decent build script, it's still not as fast as the code-refresh cycle of a typical Rails project. Even this notwithstanding, the advantages of using an interpreted language like Ruby are obvious after the first time you open up irb. Testing code in isolation is much faster than compiling and navigating to the appropriate screen to verify the results visually after every change to the code.

• Macromedia (and now Adobe) have made it clear that their primary goal for the SWF format is the enterprise, and have devoted most of the recent product development on the platform to Flex and Apollo (a.k.a. "Flex and AJAX on your Desktop").
  
  This leaves Flash developers stuck at a crossroads. Either we can go on and embrace Flex (and consequently MXML), or we can keep doing things the way we're doing, but use Actionscript 3 instead of 2. For those who use the Flash IDE, this doesn't change much. For those of us who use command-line compilers like MTASC, this means that unless we want to completely change our development process and start using Flex, we're stuck with a significant increase in our compile time using Adobe's Java-based AS3 compiler.
  
  Of course we could just trust Nicolas and dive into haXe, but I'm reluctant to branch off into a language other than Actionscript.

So what can Adobe do to save Flash?

Well, they could start by releasing a standalone AS3 compiler that doesn't take more than 2 or 3 seconds to compile a typical project on any decently fast computer (that includes my Intel Mac Mini).

As for the headaches induced by Flash and Actionscript's legacy of pain, they've started going in the right direction by going ECMAScript compatible with AS3, but the real work needs to be done in removing the technical hurdles for things that should be stupidly easy to do. That includes embedded typography, audio, video, and HTML/CSS.

For now, I'm still slugging away with AS2 and Flash 8, and I won't be considering any major changes until I see how things play out with Flash Player 9.