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The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

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Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#91

Post by jchw »

blueprint wrote: post #18
jchw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haxe is pretty interesting. I really wish strongly that it was more polished and had a larger ecosystem, because it feels like a nice development environment and is quite nice to code in.

As a native mobile dev, I found myself unable to adopt it because I need and/or want direct access to the native platform capabilities, most especially when it comes to building GUIs. Write-once tends not to work so well when users are able to tell behavior, framerate, appearance, … differences in a split second and when optimal UX was my purpose in writing mobile apps in the first place. In the same way, learn-once…

Have you seen Flutter.io? I haven't tried it but it sounds like the framework for you.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#92

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

ralusek wrote: post #61
egypturnash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Adobe Flash authoring environment has been rebranded as Adobe Animate now that it can output html/js/canvas content. It’s closed source of course. Long before that, however, the fairly simple to understand Actionscript 2 was replaced by the more powerful but much more complicated Actionscript 3 and it became a lot less friendly to a new programmer.

ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way. I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern…

AS1 was a very close relation of JavaScript, prototype inheritance and all. AS2 was based on Netscape's initial proposal for ECMAScript 4. AS3 was a more fully developed proposal for ECMAScript 4, which in turn was abandoned.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#93

Post by jandrese »

disconnected wrote: post #30
EamonnMR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the Newgrounds/Albinoblacksheep/etc world. It kills me to see all of the art produced by that community become inaccessible. I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. If there's a project I can contribute to somewhere, I'm game.

> I'm hoping that it becomes possible to run (sandboxed) flash apps in the same way that you can run DOS apps with DosBOX. Firefox + adobe flash plugin still works (well, it works for me anyway... I'm on FF 56 still). Slap it into a container (firejail works) and you are done. No need to reinvent the wheel. If you don't want the closed source solution and the Firefox dependency, there's also gnash. Slap gnash on a co…

My experience with gnash is that it even partially works on maybe 10% of the swf files I've tried. It's basically unusable.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#95

Post by jgalar »

steveklabnik wrote: post #57
scottmf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just glanced at that repo and what you say is not quite true. Looks like they have to reimplement the entire DOM API with JS interop: pub fn document() -> Document { unsafe { js!( return document; ).into_reference_unchecked() }.unwrap() }

This is required for webassembly; it has to call into JS to access the DOM.

Are there good DOM "bindings" available for other languages compiled to wasm?

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#96

Post by jandrese »

ryandrake wrote: post #85
theandrewbailey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked at/near Adobe or the Flash source, but I figured 3rd party licensing was the case.

I've always disliked this excuse. Software licenses are negotiated with third parties, not handed down from god. If Adobe really thought it would be advantageous and profitable to open source Flash, wouldn't they have gone back and renegotiated these licenses? "We'd love to do Xyz, bbbbbut licenses!" doesn't really make sense.

Or release a crippled version with with the commercial dependencies stubbed out and let the community bring it back up to speed? This could even slightly advantage Adobe as they could replace their licensed solutions with open source code and avoid the support contracts.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#97

Post by jandrese »

CaptSpify wrote: post #64
dilap wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had c…

That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.

They weren't supporting Flash long before the App Store was a thing.

I'm more inclined to believe that Adobe couldn't make a decently performant version of Flash for ARM that didn't eat battery power like a fat kid locked in a candy store.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#98

Post by mmauri »

thebouv wrote: post #72
avodonosov wrote: post #12

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

I really, really liked Flex. I built several iPad and iPhone apps with it back in the day as it was just so much more accessible than XCode and Objective-C. To this day I still say it was my favorite environment and language to build in (AS3).

We had a quite large Flex AS3 Business analytics Flash App (100K LoC). We had to rewrite it to get away from Flash plugin and because of Haxe+HaxeUI+OpenFL we saved literally 1 year of development+testing. Haxe also allows us to maintain and improve a web + native app with a single code base with a very small team. Compilation errors and strict typing IMHO is a must for your own peace of mind, when you are dealing with a big code base.

I could say Haxe and its ecosystem has saved our company from dying along with flash plugin.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#99

Post by CaptSpify »

jandrese wrote: post #97
CaptSpify wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.

They weren't supporting Flash long before the App Store was a thing. I'm more inclined to believe that Adobe couldn't make a decently performant version of Flash for ARM that didn't eat battery power like a fat kid locked in a candy store.

Yeah, but the app store was in the works by day one.

Re: The Death of Flash and Rewriting 1.4M Lines of Code

#100

Post by minitech »

ralmidani wrote: post #78

I have zero sympathy for anyone who feels pressured to convert a Flash app these days. The writing has been on the wall for so long, and there are still at least 2 whole years before Adobe cuts off support. Flash is the established cause of so many computer crashes, so many security exploits, and so much battery drainage. It is downright irresponsible for anyone to force users to use Flash in 2017, even if Adobe prom…

What do your computer model and school have to do with Flash?
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