Occasional Thoughts

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.

...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?

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???

In case you want to build Flex applications using Maven 2 the Flex Mojo plugin is surely the best Maven 2 plugin to accomplish a fully featured build setup. Unfortunately it lacks documentation. So the best resource for settings up own Maven builds is to look at the examples that the developer Marvin Froeder uses to test the plugin.

Marvin Froeder has also a blog where he used to announce changes. However yesterday I realized that I was still building against the Flex 3.0.0 SDK and was looking for information on how to update the build against the latest 3.3.0 SDK. Fortunately Marvin is very, very fast and responsive in the Google Groups discussion group so I took a look into and searched for information and found a thread, where Flex-Mojo 3.0.0 was mentioned. So I tried to upgrade and get the latest Flex Mojo Maven plugin and it was not as easy as running mvn -up.

So here are the upgrade instructions from flex-mojo 2.0.0 to flexmojos-maven-plugin 3.x:

Robert Eckstein from Sun Microsystems has created a video tutorial that gives a quick, but great introduction to JavaFX.

However isn't it embarrassing that Sun is using Flash to deliver this video? Seems like Sun does not trust its own technology and rather uses the technology of a competitor. Would Microsoft ever use Flash for Silverlight tutorials? Hardly!

The Apache project in contrast seems to have more trust in the Java technology than Sun and delivers the keynote video for ApacheCon Europe as applet. And this applet proves that even Java applets can deliver Videos in just a few seconds using JDK 1.6u10.