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Something happened this week that is monumental in the software development world. Adobe announced that they were caving in and supporting HTML 5 for the future of application and mobile development.
What is the impact of this? It means that they are not going to continue the support of Flash moving forward. A couple of thoughts on this …
Steve Jobs decided long ago to not support flash in IOS. This meant that the iPhone and all IOS devices would not support Flash. You may have heard at times about people complaining about the lack of Flash. Steve held to his belief that it was not the future of mobile application software throughout the backlash. Other devices touted the support of Flash usually with the understanding that IOS did not have it.
There were times that I missed Flash on my IOS device. These times were few, but existing. Usually I got around it and it never was a big deal.
With this announcement, the makers of Flash (Adobe) “caved in” and realized that the future of mobile application development was NOT Flash. So, looks like either Steve was right, or that the iPhone/iPad has been so successful in the market that it skewed the future of the support of Flash.
I was a Flex developer back in my development days. Flex creates Flash. So this announcement means that Flex is also a dead-end product. This is not entirely true because a version of Flex (Adobe Air) allows the Flex application to be applied to a non-browser environment and run as a stand alone product on the desktop (no Flash). Also, recent versions of Flex (Flash Development) have moved into supporting mobile development automatically by porting the code over to various mobile and tablet products.
The issue at hand is all of the shops that have taken hold of Flex and supported it. These shops will have to modify their front-end code to support HTML 5, and it is causing a wave of change throughout the software development community.