The Evolution of the Flash Platform

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FLASH PLATFORM Peter Elst | Flash Platform Consultant

What will we be talking about? What is the Flash Platform? Where did we come from? Where are we now? Flash myths Where are we going?

What is the Flash Platform? The Flash Platform is a set of products and services leveraging the Adobe Flash Player that target the web, desktop, mobile and devices. - Peter Elst, May 2008

Where did we come from?

Timeline, timeline, timeline

The Skip Intro Phenomena

Rich Inter[net|active] Applications RIA white paper by Jeremy Allaire, Macromedia - 2002

Digital Art & Experimentation Erik Natzke, Joshua Davis, Rob Hodgin, Jared Tarbell

Where are we now?

Flash Player 9 / ActionScript 3.0 API consistency, everything is a class DisplayList API ECMAScript for XML (E4X) DOM3 event model Runtime errors Namespaces Binary sockets, ByteArray Reflection API …

Flash CS3

Flex Builder 3

Adobe Integrated Runtime AIR is a free cross operating system runtime that runs on PC, Mac and Linux and allows developers to build native desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, Flash and Flex Applications can be built entirely in HTML and JavaScript Adds filesystem access, local database support, drag 'n drop, windowing, icons, notifications,… http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Flash Lite 3 Latest version of the Flash Player for mobile Comes with all recent S60 and other devices Supports video streaming, ActionScript 2.0 syntax http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

Flash Media Server 3 Streams live and on demand video content to the Flash Player Supports streaming to mobile devices Flash Media Streaming Server vs Flash Media Interactive Server http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediastreaming/ http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediainteractive/

DRM?!# Adobe is taking its first steps supporting DRM in the Flash Player and AIR Flash Media Rights Management Server encrypts streams from the Flash Media Server SWF verification is a way to verify that the SWF file has not been tampered with

Papervision3D

Flash Myths

Flash and search engines Myth: Flash content can't be indexed by search engines Google and other search engines implement the Adobe Search Engine SDK which allows indexing static text within an SWF Let's give that a try! Adobe is talking to Google and others to bring 'context' into these search results

Flash and deep linking Myth: Flash can't do any deep linking or support browser button navigation Flash, Flex support basic implementations of browser button support and deep linking in the latest releases SWFAdress is a community initiative that takes this a lot further http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

Embedding Flash Myth: Flash can't be embedded as valid XHTML There are a number of solutions available using JavaScript to embed Flash content The most popular project is SWFObject, a lightweight JavaScript library that you use to write Flash content out to a div in your HTML SWFObject does Flash Player detection and can display alternative content, making it ideal for SEO http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

AIR versus Silverlight Myth: comparing the Adobe Integrated Runtime and Microsoft Silverlight AIR is a cross operating system runtime that allows developers to create desktop applications using web technologies, Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin It does not make sense to compare the two -- Silverlight versus Flash is a better comparison

Where are we going?

Open Source and Adobe

labs.adobe.com

Tamarin Tamarin is the virtual machine used in Flash Player 9 to render ActionScript 3.0 The code was donated to the Mozilla Foundation on November 7th 2006 and is to be used as the ECMAScript/JavaScript engine in a future release of the Firefox browser http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

Tamarin Tracing Tamarin Tracing is a virtual machine aimed at constrained environments (read mobile and devices) Allows a full ECMAScript / ActionScript 3.0 engine to run on devices with limited resources http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tamarin:Tracing

Flex SDK The Flex SDK was released as open source on April 26th 2007 There is a public bug base shared with the engineering team, you can vote on bugs and influence priority http://bugs.adobe.com/flex/ Nightly builds of the Flex SDK are available

BlazeDS / AMF BlazeDS and the AMF format have been open sourced on December 12th 2007 Provides developers with a lightweight version of Livecycle Data Services, providing integration with a Java backend and pushing data to Flash clients http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS

Open Screen Project Partnership with various manufacturers and content providers, including: Cisco, Intel, BBC, MTV, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, … announced on May 1st 2008 The goal is to bring the Flash Player and AIR runtime across desktop, mobile and devices in a unified platform with over the air updates What does that mean? - No more license restrictions on the Flash Player, FLV - Anyone can develop their own Flash Player - No more license fees for embedding the Flash Player

Flash quot;Nextquot; The next version of the Flash authoring environment was shown at the MAX conference in Chicago Focus of this product cycle is expressiveness

XFL FLA files have historically always been in a binary format XFL is a zip based format that contains all project assets and an XML document that describes the layout Adobe products will output to XFL and Flash will be able to bring that in and build its project file from that

Pixel Bender Previously known as project Hydra Pixel shader language that creates effects for Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, etc. Everyone will now be able to easily write their own lightweight filters and use them across products http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/pixelbender/

Pacifica Pacifica is a service that allows you to integrate high quality VOIP, messaging and presence in your Flash, Flex and AIR applications Based on the SIP protocol and allows P2P communication after the connection is set up through their server http://pac.ifica.net

Buzzword

Photoshop Express

Flash / C++ Experimental research project by Scott Petersen Cross compiles C and C++ code into ActionScript bytecode Simulates multi-threading in the Flash Player http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1095

Thermo Thermo is a product aimed at visual and interaction designer to prototype Flex applications that can then be handed over to a development team while maintaining the integrity of the design Attempts to solve issues with the designer / developer workflow http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

Resources www.peterelst.com skipintro.blip.tv labs.adobe.com opensource.adobe.com adobe.com/devnet feeds.adobe.com

Get in touch! Peter Elst Flash Platform Consultant Email: info@peterelst.com Twitter: peterelst LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterelst Feel free to grab a business card, buy me a beer and/or get in touch with your questions, comments, feedback!

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The Evolution of the Flash Platform

by Peter Elst on May 30, 2008

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The Evolution of the Flash Platform — Presentation Transcript