Adobe’s Flash product has obviously been an integral part of the web for many years now. But it still has a major weakness when it comes search engines and complexity. While Adobe and others have been working on solutions to make Flash-based website more Google-friendly, they’re still nowhere near as crawl-able as regular HTML-based pages. FluidHTML or “Fhtml” is a new server-side markup language that hopes to merge Flash-like functionality with the easier-to-use HTML language.
Obviously, trying to create what would essentially have to be a new web standard is no small task. But the group behind Fhtml thinks they have a shot to do it because Flash is so widely used by millions of sites on the web who want a better visual appearance than HTML can offer. Aside from just Flash, Fhtml is also going up against Silverlight another Adobe framework, Flex. But Fhtml claims to be not only simpler than both Flash and Silverlight, but more powerful than Flex. → Read More
Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up.
Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Here’s a summary:
1. Release of Adobe AIR 1.5. The Adobe AIR client now has better performance and memory handling, but most importantly it supports Flash Player 10 and Webkit (which is what the mobile browsers in both the iPhone and Android are based on). Flash Player 10 means more 3-d graphics. This version of AIR will also include an encrypted database that should appeal to developers of enterprise apps. → Read More
Adobe launches the Flex 2 product line tomorrow along with Flash Player 9. Flex is a web web development environment used by programmers to build rich web applications that can make use of Flash and/or Ajax. The main advantage of Flex is that it makes developing Flash applications a lot easier, and easily combining it with Javascript to make full feature-rich web applications. Many development suites have made claims in the past to ease the development process with rich web applications, but most developers still stick to using just text editors and Javascript libraries as the simple approach offers most flexibility. Flex seems to be on the right track, offering a powerful environment that will allow the developer to build either Flash applications, and in the future, full Ajax applications. The IDE is based on Eclipse, which is already very popular and is open source. Flex adds support for syntax completion, an integrated compiler and a realtime debugger that will save a lot of the common pain with debugging web applications. Adobe has a new pricing mechanism for the Flex platform, but the basic Flex SDK is now free. There are many different options in this space, the most popular being the open source web application development environment OpenLaszlo. With what is already a great feature set and the ability to work well with other Adobe applications I am sure that Flex will be a hit with wep application developers who would like to build cool apps, but who don’t have the patience to learn the finer details of ActionScript and Javascript. Adobe have listed a large number of sample applications that were built using Flex on their website, and also have a large number of developer resources. Bill McCoy, GM of Adobe’s ePublishing Business, has an overview of the announcement on his blog. Adobe also launched Flex.org yesterday, a new resource for Flex developers. → Read More
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