- Image via Wikipedia
I’m excited. Not because a technology is dying, necessarily, but because something far, far better has risen in it’s place. Because now I, as a developer, can use a language (no, ActionScript is not a language, at least in my book) that works for rapid development, that leverages my existing knowledge of CSS, and that users won’t have to use a plugin for.
Flash is dead, long live jQuery.
I’ve recently been playing around on a few pseudo-projects, where I’ve just done as much “flashy” stuff as I can (Maybe I’ll update these later if I ever have anything finished.) So far, I’ve had things fade in, things move, things flash, things animate to different colors, things change when they’re focused on, or moused over, or clicked on… almost everything anyone used flash for in the past, I’ve been able to replicate. The only thing I haven’t tried so far is embedding multimedia (I have used a sound plugin that works beautifully, though.) And all of this with a few lines of code, no compiling.. and only a 19kb download.
Almost everything I’ve ever wanted to do with jQuery already exists in a plugin. Everything else was either a tweak of another plugin, or something I built myself, and always under 20 lines of code. Make that happen with Actionscript.
I guess what I’m saying is: jQuery is easier for the developer to develop, and it’s easier for the client computer to run (no plugins, faster, direct dom manipulation). So, why is anyone still using Flash?
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#1 by anonymous on May 21, 2009 - 11:43 pm
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Jack,
Flash is not only still needed, but in many ways better than jquery. Flash gets rendered as vector graphics, so the image quality is the same at any scale and resolution. If I have a demo looping on a monitor at a trade show, for example, it sure as hell won’t be in JQuery. Most ActionScript will be less lines of code than JQuery also.
Jquery is convenient and nice for most usages, but doesn’t replace flash.
PS this is Jason, of TimeManager fame.
#2 by Jack Lawson on May 22, 2009 - 3:22 pm
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Jason-
jQuery can handle SVG in modern browsers (of course, that’s me assuming you’re using a modern browser); and I agree – for looping demos and movies, that’s where Flash reigns. Perhaps “Flash is Dead” was a bad title; maybe it should be “Flash is being reduced to what it was designed for”. And I’ve done absolutely amazing things in one or two lines of jQuery – and that compiled flash file is most likely going to be a much larger filesize than jQuery (which may already be cached if we’re pulling from Google’s servers) plus whatever code I wrote.
And awesome… how’s it going? I owe pretty much everything I have today to TimeManager’s code and working (the tiny bit I did) with .NET, so thanks (bit understated though a “thanks” may be).