This is almost off-topic, but I have to ask:
I’m confused - how do you not mean Moonlight when talking about an open source alternative to Silverlight?
Yes, Moonlight is the open source alternative to Silverlight, I’m not denying that. I’m just saying we need a whole new framework for producing the kind of content that can be produced with Flash and Silverlight, something that is more of an open standard and not based on proprietary protocols or frameworks. Frankly I don’t want all the .NET mess that Silverlight/Moonlight need (even if it is a “cut-down” .NET.)
After the fiasco that was/is the Doc format and Microsoft’s various bad HTML implementations in IE, I think the world has had enough definition of “standards” from Microsoft.
Flash is just as bad.
Well, there was this neat cross-platform thing that allowed rich and powerful, cross-platform application development, and was supposedly “WORA” (write-once-run-anywhere - yeah right) called Java…
And there’s this really neat XML/Javascript-based cross platform rich-UI development environment known as XUL - but nobody knows how to use it, develop for it, etc… and in fact it’s constantly criticized as “bloat” when people talk about Firefox or Thunderbird.
There’s even SVG+SMIL for scripting some vector graphic animation stuffs… but … well, I guess it probably sucks - since nobody seems to really be supporting it yet.
Somewhere along the way, Macromedia/Adobe seemed to make serious inroads with the web developer community and Flash became the de-facto standard for rich web-based content.
And basically Microsoft came along and took ideas from Flash, Java, and XUL and wrote their own thing.
The problem is - nobody seems to embrace the “standard” and “open” technologies that already exist - Microsoft and Adobe (previously Macromedia) seem to be much more successful at “selling” their tools thus far. Clearly they’re providing something enticing that the others haven’t yet figured out.
Sorry for the semi-rant - but it seems to me that there are alternatives, but people just aren’t taking them seriously. Corporations are always going to fill the gaps when open source and standards are too slow to do it first.
@Urias
I’d say alternatives to Flash are being used increasingly. JavaScript and DHTML has always existed, but the quality of some of the JavaScript frameworks now, means that people are doing AJAX calls and animation that may have been done in Flash before.
How do you feel about Adobe opening up the Flash format? It seems that there’s some way to go, but I hope it will eventually solve this issue. The situation with PDF works, and professionals will always want to pay for a top-notch authoring environment for Flash. The situation with Photoshop versus the Gimp is similar.
I must admit, I’m a fan of Flash/Flex/ActionScript 3/AIR. I think it’s a really good combination of technologies. I’ve been moving away from it towards Mootools, partly because of its closed nature, but I could be won over. I’m certainly not won over by Moonlight. I don’t believe in “shared-source” and I think Microsoft are playing a confidence trick with the Mono team, while trying to divide & conquer the Linux community. It’s an interesting time, but I think and hope the whatever is the most open format will win.
Chris
I’m personally pleased with Adobe for releasing the specs. It’s also a nicely written spec, plenty of detail about how stuff works, and also I’ve seen a mention of where some files deviate from the spec (they got the JPEG header a bit wrong in their bitmap tags). That makes me interested enough to see what would happen if someone just wrote a player to implement the spec - I think it’s quite likely to do a decent job on most of the flash content around.
So is since haiku just got the GCC2/GCC4 hybrid build capability what are the chances now of a gnash port? hmm, boost is indeed huge if haiku could build it it would be impressive as far as posix and all goes.
cb88
From having tested the versions included in Ubuntu 8.04 of both Gnash and Swfdec, I’d say haiku should go with Swfdec.
Overall Swfdec just seems to work a lot better on most sites.
Over at Bebits mmu_man said, “We do have a port of gnash in the work.
But it’s not stable yet.”
Read mmu_man’s comment here:
http://bebits.com/talkback/3143
So, it looks like some developers may be working on Gnash. I thought it was just M.Lotz.
I’m guessing Haiku R1 will be based off GCC4. So, it should make it easier to port over programs like Gnash.
A flash bounty started yesterday and has already collected over $100.
If you want to see flash on Haiku, please contribute too!