Flash: Looking Back, Looking Forward - Challenges
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One of Adobe's challenges for the future is to turn Flash into more of a general-purpose application development platform, and to encourage developers to see it that way. "Today the shift is from animations to applications," explained Lynch. To this end, Adobe introduced Flex, a Flash development environment, and beefed up the Flash Player so that it runs scripts faster.
Adobe is also working on Apollo, a project that will let applications written for Flash run without a web browser. "Everyone is rushing in the same direction, which is to reduce the barriers between a web page, an application and multimedia content," observed Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group.
The Apollo project addresses the fact that developers now have many more options when it comes to developing web applications, including other scripting languages and tools, and AJAX. Indeed, Adobe recently joined Open Ajax, which is a project for AJAX development.
Even Flash's competitive advantage of being able to run on many different browsers and operating systems is being challenged, from an unlikely quarter: Microsoft. The software giant is working on Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. This development software is supposed to render Windows applications on different operating systems and browsers. Lynch doesn't sound very worried about it, though. "It's good that Microsoft is recognizing the need for Microsoft applications to run everywhere, but it's very hard to achieve -- and we have achieved that with Flash," he noted.
Another challenge Adobe faces is the perception that it does not support the Linux operating system. Most recently, the company has been criticized for not creating a Linux 8 Flash Player. According to Downy, however, the Linux version of Flash Player is in very active development. "That's one of the major misconceptions out there, that we have only one intern working on the Linux player...We decided to skip version 8 on Linux and go straight to version 9 just because of timing," he explained.
Adobe has created a web site that celebrates the tenth anniversary of Flash. The software looks and works very differently from the way it did originally. There is little telling what it will look like 10 years from now, aside from the fact that it will have continued to evolve to meet the changing needs and challenges of a new generation of designers and developers.
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