Thinking about it ... don't kill Flash!

Introduction

This article probably won't be well liked by those in the industry, but here goes ... I wrote an article about Flash, and said that the Flash's time was up [here], but after reading all the horror stories around killing-off Flash, I've had time to think about it, and I would like to say that it is one of the best software packages I have ever used. The concentration has been around it's technical problems, but as a environment for cross-platform development, there has been few to come near it.

For all the people calling for it it, I wonder how many of those people have actually used it, and, if so, what they have done with it. Okay, it has been under the spot light, and it's not perfect, but it is also no OpenSSL package, with sloppy code and version control.

Don't mess with Steve

Its main cross-road came when it crossed-swords with Steve Jobs, and it has never really recovered from that. Everything that Steve wrote about was fixable, but he wanted to control the software on his devices. Few would have ever gotten away with that in these days of open systems, but he did, and he wrote extensively on the reasons (without really giving Adobe the chance to fix).

I was in at the start of Flash development and I used ActionScript 1.0 extensively. It basically allowed me to create variables without actually declaring them - just like versions of BASIC! This was great when you have a small amount of ActionScript, but became a nightmare with my Cisco simulators, as they had a great deal of code. ActionScript 2.0 came along, and it was a proper programming language, but I found it too difficult to scale, so I moved to Microsoft .NET, and it was the best move I ever made.

My work is now mainly in ASP.NET MVC, and it has completely changed my viewpoint on software development. I've now build several large-scale sites, and each time I've found it to be perfect for scalability and performance. With MVC, I can work with designer (the V in MVC), while I concentrate on the M (Model) and C (Controller) part.

Still ahead of the game?

Over 10 years ago, I developed a whole lot of things that I would really struggle to create now with JavaScript (Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!):

If your browser doesn't block Flash, here's some of my demos:

https://asecuritysite.com/information/flash

Conclusions

Sorry ... I still love Flash ... and regret its passing. If Steve hadn't crippled it, I would still be developing with it, as it would be a natural fit for both iPhone and Android! My test engines would look beautiful, and self contained.

For just now I use the horrible and nasty JavaScript ... and Ajax! Compared with them, Flash was a dream to work with. An academic we are trained to assess all the aspects of something, and not just take one aspect, so, for me, Flash is generally wonderful for what it has managed to do.

Here's what I did for my millionaire tests ... many years ago:

https://billatnapier.com/ids4.htm

and here they are now in HTML/JavaScript:

https://asecuritysite.com/tests/fun?sortBy=ethical01

The Flash version is much better!

How have we allowed JavaScript to win, but we dump Flash .. strange World?

The one prediction I got wrong many years ago, was the JavaScript would die, and look where it is now! One thing I know, is that Flash has no chance of surviving, and as it is not supported on mobile devices ... which are the lifeblood of the Cyber Age. If you are not on Apple iOS and Android, your software is going to die.

I must be remember that Flash was created when people were nice, and they hadn't thought about dropping another type of script through Flash, and for it to go all the way through to and jump out the sandbox.