Occasional Thoughts

...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 nut 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?

Spring Actionscript is a great library - no question. It makes it much easier to mock Cairngorm service delegates and rewire them for testing with FlexUnit. Testing the full event/command/delegate workflow is pretty easy.

However today I had quite some "fun" with the Maven artifact and it's transitive dependencies in combination with Maven 2.2.1. Spring Actionscript has some dependencies to these artifacts:

• as3commons-lang
• as3commons-logging
• as3commons-reflect

Maven module structure of the project.

You can see that there is one high level library (library A) that is shared across all applications and a more specialized library (library B) that is providing components and classes to a certain subset of other applications.

Library A contains a couple of embedded images containing various icons and a lot of components, while Library B contained just a few components. So after compilation the obvious expected result would be to have an RSL file of library A that is much bigger than the RSL file of library B in case library B uses library A as RSL and not as statically linked SWC.

Well the dynamic linkage worked well for all the applications, which where just a couple of KBs in size after the change in contrast to more than 1 MB before the change. However this was not the case for the libraries. Library A had a size of 1.2 MB but library B had a size of 1.25 MB???

When I tried to update another project to flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.x I realized that I missed a step, when I wrote the upgrade instructions from flex-mojos 2.0.0 to the newer plugin. While the first project was at its very beginning with no Unit tests existing yet, the newer project had already quite some unit tests.

When running maven after I followed my own instructions I go this error:

[ERROR] <PROJECT PATH>/target/test-classes/TestRunner.mxml:[-1,-1] Unable to locate specified base class 'org.sonatype.flexmojos.unitestingsupport.TestApplication' for component class 'TestRunner'.