In spite of the recent effort from Apple, and strongly held philosophy to fully embrace technologies such as HTML 5 over Flash and Silver light by companies such as Google, Flash will be around for a long time. Here is why.
Apple recently made the decision to restrict the creation of applications for the iPhone and iPad to native objective c code. Further, they have decided to continue their policy of not supporting the flash player for websites within the iPhone and iPad.
The reasoning, of course, is that plug-in technologies like Flash and Silverlight are both proprietary and specifically in Flash’s case have traditionally been resource hogs. With the eventual adoption of HTML 5 standards, more and more can be done within the browser in native HTML and scripting. Much advanced application design, animation, and other functionality that was traditionally limited to Flash or Silverlight will be done using open standards.
However, as a RIA (Rich Internet Application) developer building complex enterprise level applications, there is no doubt that HTML 5 applications for us remains 2 to 3 times more costly to build, and thus not an option. Why?
Here are 3 reasons HTML-based applications cost more to create:
(1) Tools. Development tools for JavaScript framework applications, although making great strides in the past few years, cannot come close to touching the ease and power of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, and even the Eclipse IDE used to develop Flex applications.
(2) Development Collaboration. JavaScript is a loosely typed language that is very difficult to use for large-scale, multi-developer projects. Inheritance, Polymorphism, Object Oriented Programming and other programming construct although may technically be possible within JavaScript are cumbersome and difficult to work with when compared to traditional languages such as the .NET family, JAVA, or even ActionScript. These problems are made worse when working with teams larger then just a couple of developers.
(3) Power. Even Google, one of the greatest proponents of using purely HTML browser-based applications uses Flash for their Google Maps street view. Why? Because HTML isn’t yet powerful enough to handle this advanced functionality. Another example is Adobe's Photoshop.com, a light version of their hugely popular desktop product. Photoshop.com can manipulate photographs client-side in a way that is simply impossible in HTML and JavaScript. Browser-based applications are currently too limiting in what can be done.
For these and other reasons, we will continue to support the proprietary, plug-in-based technologies like Flash, Silverlight, etc., in creating our RIA applications for some time to come.
Posted:
5/14/2010 2:39:07 PM by
Tom Loveland | with
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