Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different • Hacker News Board

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#171

Post by d3sandoval » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #168

mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set. If you wa…

This. This is why I'm thankful to be a developer/designer at this time in the web's history. Browser support for features that I need to make a cohesive user experience has never been better!

I have a lot of gratitude to google, mozilla (and even Microsoft and Apple, as they come around to it) for making my job easier/possible.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#172

Post by walterstucco » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

> would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once

What really made flash better than the rest (and still make it) was the ability to use a familiar interface for creatives (a timeline is a timeline) to to build resolution independent artifacts that they could test on their own, on their personal computers, just by pressing ENTER or frame by frame

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#173

Post by acdha » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

merdreubu wrote: post #107

mortenjorck wrote: post #11

Flash was the great motivator for browser vendors to improve [their] technology Flash was the first technology to really compete with the open web. That competition (which went both ways, mind you; recall such late excesses as Flash's Text Layout Framework) ultimately made the web stronger and more versatile. It's hard to imagine what the world might look like today had that fire never been lit under the web standard…

At the same time it's not hard to imagine how much better the world would be today if Macromedia was not sold to Adobe, and Adobe was not scared into abandoning Flash by the concerted efforts of Apple, Microsoft and the web standards zealots.

Adobe wasn't scared in to abandoning Flash, they just stopped investing in in the early 2000s. Nothing prevented them from cleaning up the warts, adding an automatic updater a decade earlier, taking security seriously, investing in performance, etc.

Part of why the HTML5 group got so much traction was that everyone else realized that the web's rich application platform couldn't be a company which wasn't serious about maintaining it.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#174

Post by icebraining » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:36 PM UTC

Nekorosu wrote: post #154

dyarosla wrote: post #13

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, all wrapped in a single neat package . I would contest that no other software, even today, has come close to being able to do these three so seamlessly at once (Really, I encourage you to try to name one!) Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, fil…

I second that except there was no filesize bloat. The plugin itself was quite heavy but the size of a flash site, banner, game and whatnot was based on amount of binary resources inside (images, sounds, videos). I remember Ad networks limits on flash banner sizes being very strict, less than 15 kBs. This was achievable because of excellent vector graphics capabilities of Flash IDE and plugin.

The problem is that it was hard (read: harder than with regular HTML files) to divide the file into different pages, or to implement progressive downloading, so many sites would download every single asset on the first request.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#175

Post by ivanhoe » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:37 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #168

mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set. If you wa…

You forget that Flash was a complete, well-rounded development environment, not just a language. It's a difference between Unity and e.g. writing your own solution in C++. The later is certainly way more powerful and gives you a lot more choices and freedom, but it takes a lot of effort and testing and learning to build a really productive tech stack and workflow that way. The same thing with HTML/JS/CSS. So many frameworks to choose from, IDE's have only very basic support for them, documentation sucks (if any), no good visual tools for animation, takes a lots of steps to push data from one tool to another (exporting/importing, converting different formats, etc.), you need to install a dozen of different tools and frameworks and then you still need to code a lot of basic stuff yourself. On the other hand Tools like Unity or Flash give you all you need in a single box, all perfectly integrated to work together, documented, you can just jump right into making things.

It's the same thing that Delphi & Visual Studio did for modern programming. If you were used to working in Turbo Pascal/C and switched to Delphi, it was just amazing what a productive boost you'd experience from having a true integrated development environment with all the little tools and drag&drop builders and ready-made components.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#176

Post by TimJYoung » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #151

What boggles me is that it's still hard to put together a UI by dragging/dropping some fields together. If Visual Basic (and Delphi, and others) had this basically solved twenty years ago, why is it still something that's so hard to do for HTML?

Our product, Elevate Web Builder, does exactly what you describe:

https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb&type=web

(Examples at the bottom)

Here's an (older) video that shows the IDE in use:

https://youtu.be/o1cU0KoJU8Q

I wouldn't consider what we're doing as "hard". The main thing is that the developer has to be willing to do some odd things relative to traditional web development, such as:

- Don't use JS as the development language, and only use it as a target for a statically-typed, compiled language. It's basically impossible to do a decent IDE without the type information. Even simple things like getting method signatures of event types for selecting/creating event handlers is impossible without types.

- Don't use CSS and, instead, use per-element style modifications via code. CSS is too broad a brush for component-based development where you want to allow the developer to customize the look and feel of every visual control on a per-control basis. Also, it lacks the flexibility required for dealing with weird/odd control state transitions.

In general, one has to take a step back from the HTML/CSS/JS world and virtualize everything in code in order to allow for dual design-time/run-time usage (we're adding server-side right now). Unfortunately, this also has the side-effect of not being "normal" web development anymore, so we're definitely swimming against the tide. But, I think it's the way to create more reliable and dependable web applications in a must more productive manner.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#177

Post by petraeus » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:42 PM UTC

The problem with flash wasn't that it didn't create great animations, it did. The problem was it was not web friendly, you can't build a seo site in flash, you cannot build a maintainable database driven project in flash. You cannot build security into flash. Its great for doing little animations but thats it.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#178

Post by agentultra » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:46 PM UTC

> In someway ES6 tries the best by adding classes. But there is plenty of other missing features like: final classes, private, public, protected, internal accessors. Explicit inline (This is more compiler feature than language), strong typed (thankfully we have TypeScript), well designed Event System with nice propagation (It’s more like a library feature rather tan language), no confusion with undefined, no confusion with this, and static variables / functions. Well, public/private/protected are reserved keywords in the latest spec... so they're coming.

Personally I don't see these as features but deficiencies.

I liked the Flash creator tools; I haven't used a vector drawing + animation system quite like it since.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#179

Post by jnbiche » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:50 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #81

jnbiche wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, I encourage you to try to name one! The CreateJS suite covers most, if not all, of what Flash could do in JavaScript. In fact, it is the library used by Adobe Animate professional to export Flash programs to HTML5 target. It may not be as user-friendly, but it's as comprehensive.

CreateJS is not an integrated digital art, animation and coding tool. It is a set of programming libraries that can program these things.

OK, CreateJS with NanoFL, then. I prefer to work without GUI tools, but they are available if needed. But I readily grant that they are not advanced as the original Flash environment.

BTW, to those that downvoted this comment to -2, in HN we generally don't downvote to express disagreement.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#180

Post by freehunter » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:58 PM UTC

orionblastar wrote: post #42

freehunter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?

I did Visual Basic and MS Access programming mostly in the late 1990s. Upscaling to SQL Server when the database grew too large etc. IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal. Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.

Rails and Python are fine, I've used both of them extensively, but they are no comparison to VB in any way. Sure they're easy enough to use, but it's all 100% pure code. The biggest benefit of VB was the interface was not coded, it was drawn. There's no way to do that with Rails or Python.