THE EVOLUTION OF THE FLASH PLATFORMPeter 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 3.0API consistency, everything is a classDisplayList APIECMAScript for XML (E4X)DOM3 event modelRuntime errorsNamespacesBinary sockets, ByteArrayReflection 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 3Latest 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 3Streams 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

FC64

Flash Myths

Flash and search enginesMyth: 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 linkingMyth: 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 FlashMyth: 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 SilverlightMyth: 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

TamarinTamarin 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 TracingTamarin 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 / AMFBlazeDS 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 ProjectPartnership 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 "Next"The next version of the Flash authoring environment was shown at the MAX conference in Chicago

Focus of this product cycle is expressiveness

XFLFLA 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 BenderPreviously 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/

PacificaPacifica 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

ThermoThermo 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.comTwitter: peterelstLinkedIn: 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!