Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

I think what Flash (the program) really excelled at was giving creators the ability to draw, animate and program interactive objects, <i>all wrapped in a single neat package</i>. 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!)<p>Sure, when it came down to it you can say it had poor performance, security, filesize bloat (all things that were fixable or you could work around). But in reality, it allowed for developers to create amazing things in a fraction of the time it would take in any other environment.<p>As for myself, I&#x27;ve moved on to OpenFL and Haxe. It&#x27;s fast, it&#x27;s lean, it&#x27;s cross-platform, it&#x27;s open source... but it&#x27;s still not the same.

About the open source AVM2, there are in total 3 versions:<p>The tamarin project on Mozilla mercurial with tamarin-central [0] and tamarin-redux [1]<p>Then after the project got abandoned, Adobe renamed it to avmplus and moved it to github [2] and made a couple updates.<p>Later on, they moved it to another repo [3], updated it on December 2015 to the equivalent of Flash Player v19.0 and updated it again on Mars 2016 to the equivalent of Flash Player v20.0 (codename rankin).<p>I maintain a fork&#x2F;extension named redtamarin [4] which focus mainly on adding native API to make ActionScript 3.0 run on the command-line, shell scripts, server-side, etc.<p>imho FlasCC&#x2F;Alchemy&#x2F;CrossBridge did not take off because it is much harder for dev to produce a project in C++ than in AS3, also why redtamarin took an opposite approach: bring the C API to the AS3 context instead of forcing users to actually write C&#x2F;C++ code.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.mozilla.org&#x2F;tamarin-central" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.mozilla.org&#x2F;tamarin-central</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.mozilla.org&#x2F;tamarin-redux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hg.mozilla.org&#x2F;tamarin-redux</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adobe-flash&#x2F;avmplus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adobe-flash&#x2F;avmplus</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adobe&#x2F;avmplus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adobe&#x2F;avmplus</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Corsaair&#x2F;redtamarin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Corsaair&#x2F;redtamarin</a>

The question is, do any of the existing web stacks come close to the beginner friendly aspects of the original flash?<p>I don&#x27;t think so.. I can imagine any of my musician friends installing $FRAMEWORK and building a web site full of their own animations, menu&#x27;s, and music playback..<p>Flash for all its &quot;evilness&quot; still IMHO hasn&#x27;t been matched.

Ah! Flash!<p>I started my career as a programmer but always had a mind for creative designs. When I discovered Flash around 2002-2003, I was all over it. ActionScript was my ultimate weapon to make Flash sing and dance to all my tunes.<p>I was so involved then, Macromedia picked me as one of their &quot;Professional Expert&quot; or something in that line. Those were the times when I made good money, lots of friends, clients, met few interesting business partners.<p>In the summer of 2005, just as it was about to be acquired by Adobe, I got an email that I was invited to their office in San Francisco. I was one of the 20-odd people from around the world picked up for something called the &quot;Lego&quot; Team. I was overwhelmed, humbled, and scared - to meet all the authors from whose book I learned ActionScript, all those developers whose files I downloaded to learn Flash&#x2F;ActionScript. It was a blast.<p>If you were into Flash during those times, you&#x27;d remember names such as Guy Watson (FlashGuru), Brandon Hall, Peter Hall, Colin Mook, Aral Balkan, Jesse Warden, Peter Hall, Marcos Weskamp, Grant Skinner, etc. Well, it was the congregation of the whos-who of the Flash world at that time.<p>Well, all of our names were then featured on the credit screen of Macromedia Flash. Some of us also realized that Flash was dying and something needed to be done. Adobe came along and well, Macromedia and Flash became just another archive on Wikipedia.<p>Next year, 2006, the company I founded was acquired by a Startup from Silicon Valley. That&#x27;s when I started my very bumpy Startup journey, and I&#x27;m still chugging along.<p>Here are some of the Macromedia Flash Lego Summit photos - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;brajeshwar&#x2F;albums&#x2F;72057594081435036" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;brajeshwar&#x2F;albums&#x2F;720575940814...</a> (who do you recognize).

Flash, specifically Flex, won the battle and then promptly lost the war as other companies remade the internet in Flex&#x27;s image.<p>Adobe&#x27;s sudden and not at all inevitable betrayal of Flex devs was a huge shock and absolutely killed Adobe in the field of Rich Internet Apps which at that point they were dominating.<p>If they&#x27;d pivoted Flex to compile to Javascript then the world as we know it would be a very different place, one where we would have been happily producing web apps in MXML markup for the last decade rather than recently rediscovering it through the medium of React and JSX.

I feel as though the author missed talking about Flex, which really took flash to the next level. It was short-lived, as it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it - but it was a great way to build sophisticated SPA&#x27;s before the javascript ecosystem was able to catch up. Thanks Flash!

<p><pre><code> Flash was the great motivator for browser vendors to improve [their] technology </code></pre> 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&#x27;s Text Layout Framework) ultimately made the web stronger and more versatile. It&#x27;s hard to imagine what the world might look like today had that fire never been lit under the web standards movement.

I was 16 in 1999 when a high school teacher presented me the Flash 4. From there I built my professional career. For most than one decade I improve my Flash and ActionScript skills and loved that. I never felt that nothing but joy when building things with Flash Platform. It was a good knowledge. Even these todays I did somethings with ActionScript 3. My company developed educational solutions with Flash for 6 years and the transition to the HTML5 promesse was painful, expensive and complex. I did not realize why Adobe did not invest some effort to keep us using Flash and ActionScript 3 to build web applications transpiled to JS (without HTML5 canvas).<p>Is there another tool capable to compile to iOS and Android over Windows with no need of a Mac with XCode? I loved that in Flash.<p>&quot;You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain&quot;. Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight.<p>Sorry for poor english. I am not native.

I had very similar feelings a few years ago. Flash defined what we now know as the web. Without it, it&#x27;d be completely different.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wedtm.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;thank-you-flash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wedtm.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;thank-you-flash&#x2F;</a>

I still haven&#x27;t forgiven Madobe for killing Macromedia Director - a thousand hours of my work lost. It taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of Open Source - protect your investment from the caprice of a single corp.

&gt; In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different.<p>Without Flash you couldn&#x27;t do <i>anything</i> at zombocom[1]!<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zombo.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zombo.com</a><p>&#x2F;&#x2F; Now that HTML+JS has has the features necessary to implement the &quot;flash intro page&quot; experience, I have yet another reason to leave javascript disabled.

What boggles me is that it&#x27;s still hard to put together a UI by dragging&#x2F;dropping some fields together.<p>If Visual Basic (and Delphi, and others) had this basically solved twenty years ago, why is it still something that&#x27;s so hard to do for HTML?

Not just flash, I&#x27;m a die-hard fireworks user and was still using it up until a few years ago, much better than PS for quick web stuff (99% of what I was doing). Was a sad day for consumers when Adobe bough them out, before they had to compete with improvements and new features for market share. I still use Adobe Fireworks regularly over Photoshop.

Once nice thing about Flash (and believe me, I don&#x27;t think there are many) is that it can go a long way towards cementing the concept of OOP to beginning programmers.<p>I was taking a high-school C++ class at the time, but the whole &quot;everything is an object&quot; concept just didn&#x27;t stick. It was still in the abstract sense and not tangible.<p>You start to play with Flash and ActionScript, however, and suddenly each instance is a physical thing you can see and interact with. Each copy of the thing you make inherits those properties and that action script.<p>It was a very useful learning experience for me. I worked through a Pong tutorial and then tried to extend it as a personal project to be a four-corner pong. It became very clear the benefits of making a position-agnostic &quot;Paddle&quot; class when the left-right paddles&#x27; collision detection went haywire upon copy-pasting them to the top and bottom of the screen.

One thing I recently discovered that is very cool is Adobe&#x27;s Alchemy (later called FlasCC and then CrossBridge) which is able to generate SWFs from C++. Not too much documentation can be found around it but it certainly intrigued me to realize you could bring your C++ applications to the browser (assuming Flash is installed&#x2F;enabled)!

I remember way back when, when I first started on the web, I got paid to make Flash sites. It was a cringey time, but the capability and animation smoothness, on Windows XP, 8 years ago, was still better than you can get on the web on a Macbook Pro today.<p>When Jobs murdered flash I transitioned to web waiting for it to come up to parity, but it never did.<p>We&#x27;ve had incremental improvements, but IMO they have been scraps, and the priority is out of wack. Why are we adding MIDI to a platform that still can&#x27;t efficiently do layout?<p>I recently gave a talk about building a new browser without the DOM, instead using native UI primitives driven by javascript for our sites: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WEQx3wz8QeY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WEQx3wz8QeY</a><p>Wherever we land, I just hope to someday get the kind of performance on the web that I got 8 years ago with Flash.

I liked Flash and still think it is vastly superior to HTML5 when it comes to games or interactive experiments BUT Flash was a closed source, proprietary tech that was controlled by a single actor and not future proof. I understand now the dangers of such platforms and why the web should be free and open.

The ironic thing is that ActionScript is being reinvented once again in form of TypeScript and its siblings.

I loved Flash - back in a time when there was only a few DHTML tricks and JavaScript was not a proper programming language, also the lack of proper CSS.<p>The year I speak of is 2001 and my task as an intern was to create a CMS for the company that could power a &quot;plain&quot; website at the same time as dynamic content for the fancy Flash website. It was hell of a lot of fun coming up with a solution that made this possible. Even managed to make the company migrate from PHP3 to PHP4 for it.<p>But not so soon after (let&#x27;s say 2005? 2006?) I wasn&#x27;t missing Flash (or it&#x27;s cousin, Shockwave) anymore. Good for games, but the more I did proper web development the more it showed that it was just interactive movies (surprise) and not so good to work with for plain (html) text.

&gt; 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 &#x2F; functions. Well, public&#x2F;private&#x2F;protected are reserved keywords in the latest spec... so they&#x27;re coming.<p>Personally I don&#x27;t see these as features but deficiencies.<p>I liked the Flash creator tools; I haven&#x27;t used a vector drawing + animation system quite like it since.

Adobe Animate CC (aka FlashCC) can compile directly to HTML5 canvas, and allow code injection. It has the same troubles with mp3 and mp4 as browsers do, and requires knowing some &quot;tricks&quot; (like how to double the canvas scaling for retina), but it&#x27;s an adequate tool.

Flash was awesome for learning script and rendering. Plugins in the early days of the web &#x27;95-&#x27;05+ were needed to push the web. HTML5, WebGL, Canvas, SVG are all heavily inspired by Flash. Mobile and smaller hardware really put a pause on Flash&#x27;s blaze of glory that was all the way up until &#x27;07&#x2F;flex&#x2F;air etc. Adobe did not move to cross-compilation fast enough nor did they improve hardware rendering early enough, Flash was largely run on CPU at the time and mobile performance was poor. Adobe also really took it hard that ES4 was shutdown and ActionScript was really the only use of that, I particularly liked it alot, ActionScript3 was a great language for interactive and web game development.<p>Flash also allowed creators to publish, many cartoon shows today still use Flash [1]. Many have moved to ToonBoom or others but many still use it.<p>Flash will always be an impressive moment in the web and interactives&#x2F;games.<p>Macromedia was quite the company, Flash&#x2F;Director both really died from Adobe&#x27;s hands. I wonder if Microsoft would have bought Macromedia if it had gone different. Macromedia really created fast web video with Flash&#x2F;ASF formats&#x2F;RTMP streaming and saved us from Real Player, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player. Flash made possible Youtube.<p>Flash is still around as Adobe Animate and OSS as OpenFL[2], lime[3], Haxe [4] and more. Though it is more focused on compilation to target platforms natively from script and AOT compiling or WebGL&#x2F;html5 output rather than to the AVM or runtime ActionScript.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Flash_animated_television_series" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Flash_animated_televis...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openfl.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openfl.org&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openfl&#x2F;lime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openfl&#x2F;lime</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haxe.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;haxe.org&#x2F;</a>

I also started with ActionScript 2 and moved to ActionScript 3 soon after.<p>Then I did Java, C++, Python and all the others before going to JavaScript. I&#x27;ve been using mostly JavaScript for the past 5 years.<p>I actually don&#x27;t miss any of the other languages, not even ActionScript 3.<p>I think that you don&#x27;t really need classes, private methods, protected methods, abstract classes, inheritance, etc... For web-related stuff.<p>Games are a bit different because, in a game, unusual edge cases happen all the time (a game can be in a practically infinite number of states), so static type checking can help take care of a lot of issues. That said, with automated testing, you can also get similar stability without having types.

Speaking of flash &amp; it being used to build entire websites, this we hear made it hard to index those sites. I remember when I was at university, the university network didn&#x27;t work with android devices because it worked over a proxy and Google&#x2F;Android weren&#x27;t fond of a proxy server because it prevented them from tracking the user. Lots of tools have died solely because they prevent bigger companies to flourish. Not saying Adobe aren&#x27;t big but you know Google and Apple are massive.

I did pretty well for myself building galleries and interactives in Flash and Actionscript; it was not just a good learning experience, but a more stress-free implementation compared to getting JavaScript to work cross-browser. I was still doing AS work into 2009. For me, it wasn&#x27;t the inevitable obsolescence from iOS that caused me to quit, but an Edward Tufte seminar in which I saw that static visualization could be just as compelling as interactive ones, and a lot easier for end users to figure out.

The problem with flash wasn&#x27;t that it didn&#x27;t create great animations, it did. The problem was it was not web friendly, you can&#x27;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.

Author: you have a typo in your header. &quot;Programming and Developmetn Environment&quot;

I feel old reading this thread

Actual content creators have a much different perception of flash than IT administrators, chinstroking tech bloggers and the inventor of Javascript.