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 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?

Yesterday I saw the movie Eagle Eye and once again it hit me in the face... (but if you haven't seen it yet and intend to do that, stop reading on. I don't want to spoil the last bit of the movie.)

Well, not exactly - in fact they have just announced their support for Python and Jython. I am just asking myself how long it takes for Sun until they are no longer able to ignore Groovy. The last thing I would like to do is to do Ruby or Python bashing... both are great languages and have proven their usefulness. Ruby/JRuby gained pretty much interest at JAX 2008 - there was a dedicated Ruby day. Python has itself proven as scripting language for various KDE applications and Jython can be found in some commercial Java products for scripting.

However it is also a fact that Groovy became very popular in a very short time and I find it very astonishing that Sun seems to ignore it. It's even more astonishing since Groovy as way closer to Java than any other of the scripting languages and therefore more natural to Java programmers. This makes Groovy an ideal choice for the fluid glue layer in projects, where most developers are Java experts with little knowledge of other scripting languages.