{"id":142,"date":"2009-02-01T14:38:49","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T18:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2009\/02\/01\/flash-is-the-new-client-side-java\/"},"modified":"2009-02-01T14:38:49","modified_gmt":"2009-02-01T18:38:49","slug":"flash-is-the-new-client-side-java","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/flash-is-the-new-client-side-java\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash is the New Client-Side Java"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember Sun&#8217;s vision for Java:\u00a0 client-side applets, downloaded on the fly, running in\/alongside the browser?\u00a0 It was a great vision, but Microsoft <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/mscorp\/java\/faq.mspx\">moved to block<\/a> browser adoption and Sun botched it.\u00a0 After nearly 15 years, client-side Java never really hit critical mass.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the original vision has quietly been realized by Adobe Flash.<\/p>\n<p>What happened?\u00a0 Video.<\/p>\n<p>Site operators (notably, Youtube in 2005) discovered Flash was the best way to get in-browser video.\u00a0 The growth of Internet video cemented Flash&#8217;s position as a ubiquitous browser-plug in.\u00a0 Then, Adobe started adding Java-like features, notably <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ActionScript\">ActionScript 3<\/a>, a fairly efficient <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adobe.com\/devnet\/actionscript\/articles\/avm2overview.pdf\">virtual machine<\/a>, and a decent set of libraries.<\/p>\n<p>Most of my developer friends reject Flash as &#8220;<em>an animation system, with a crappy scripting language<\/em>&#8220;. \u00a0 They were probably right 3-4 years ago, but not any more.\u00a0 With the latest Flash players, Adobe&#8217;s moved away from the animation-centric design to much more a generalized, programmatic system (that happens to have great animation support).<\/p>\n<p>Just like Java, except with &gt;98% market adoption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember Sun&#8217;s vision for Java:\u00a0 client-side applets, downloaded on the fly, running in\/alongside the browser?\u00a0 It was a great vision, but Microsoft moved to block browser adoption and Sun botched it.\u00a0 After nearly 15 years, client-side Java never really hit &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/flash-is-the-new-client-side-java\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}