...or why HTML 5 will fail as replacement for Flash (at least for the next years).
But first let me make clear that I am not a fan of closed standards and closed source. I love Open Source and I use Open Source software wherever possible. However sometimes it's better if there is one instance that has the control not just over a format, but also about the interpreter and renderer.
With the announcement of Apples iPad a big discussion started regarding the non-existence of Flash on it. Steve Jobs responded. He claims that Apple won't support Flash since they claim it's buggy and responsible for a lot of crashes on Mac OS, but what really makes me upset is that sentence:
No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML 5.
Also in blogs postings that talk about this topic several people mention that HTML 5 will be the future and that no one needs Flash.
Bullshit! Will people never learn from the past?
Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.
Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.
This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.
Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.
I'm glad to be able to depricate my own post Groovy++-with-Maven a couple of weeks ago. The Groovy++ team has already taken action and provides the groovvypp libraries in a commonly accessible repository. They also provide a preliminary version of the gmaven plugin that supports statically linked Groovy.
For details see Using-groovypp-with-maven and also the related update Using-groovypp-with-maven (update).