I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent work around for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distro’s but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential work around eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will.
In the past Open Web proponents have criticized Flash and Flex because the SWF specification - while being published and publicly available - limited what readers could do with the specification. More specifically the agreement to view the specification required that readers not build programs that would run SWF files. The intentions behind this were good - Adobe does not want Flash to have inconsistent and incompatible implementations.
Today Adobe Systems has announced that they are removing those restrictions on the SWF and FLV specifications!
Revolutions may be enabled by technology, but they are driven by people. Adobe’s recent announcements about Flex, Flash, and Adobe AIR on Linux are the most recent technology enablers for the software revolution that is currently underway.
Usually I’m one of the first to post about Adobe’s Linux related announcements. My trip to Bangalore, India, however, made me a little late to the party this time. In case you haven’t seen the announcements, on March 31, 2008 Adobe released an alpha version of Adobe AIR on Linux and an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux (which supports building AIR applications on Linux).
Bubblemark is a popular benchmark for some of the RIA technologies including Flex, Adobe AIR, Ajax (DHTML), Java Swing, Java FX, Silverlight, etc. I’ve been trying for a while to create a new Flex version of Bubblemark to show just how fast Flash Player and Adobe AIR are. But I’ve come to a few realizations… First, you can make benchmarks say whatever you want them to say.
When trying to optimize Bubblemark I found a few interesting things.
[Update: QVM was an internal Adobe codename. The new VM’s name seems to be “Tamarin-Tracing”. For more info on this new VM read the announcement by Edwin Smith. Edwin doesn’t explicitly state that the VM is for mobile devices but it is hinted at. However the research paper that Edwin references does state that this tracing type of VM is good for mobile devices.]
The mobile space has been heating up lately with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Sun’s JavaFX Mobile.
Yesterday was a monumental day for Flash Player. For the first time ever, a major release of Flash Player was simultaneously shipped for all three of the major operating systems - Windows, Mac, and Linux! This illustrates Adobe’s commitment to being truly cross-platform. There isn’t a ubiquitous platform in existence that is as committed to cross-platform compatibility as Adobe is with Flash Player. This is one of the things I love about Flash Player.
The more software experiences become like the natural world the more users are pleased with those experiences. One of the most powerful, understandable, and universal concepts in computing is the idea of a desktop containing files and folders. Users embraced this metaphor in their software because it modeled their natural world experience.
There is a paradigm shift underway. In this shift, developers are creating user interfaces which more closely model the natural world.
Emmy Huang just posted a note about the Flash adoption statistics as of September 2007. Flash 9 is now at 93.3% adoption! This is great news for Flex developers! If you develop with Flex 2 or the upcoming Flex 3, 93.3% of your visitors can run your applications without any hassle of having to update Flash. Now why haven’t Sun and Microsoft published their statistics so that developers are able to compare the adoption of the different RIA platforms?
As [previously discussed][1], my friend Joshua from Sun [recently blogged][2] about how the consumer JRE will take market share from Flash in 2008. Today Sameer Tyagi , also from Sun, [blogged][3] about problems with using Flex to front-end JAX-WS. Both posts seem to insinuate Flash and Flex as competitors to Java. Yet for me Java and Flex have always been a perfect match.
The continued success of Flash and Flex only helps to better position Java in the enterprise.
My friend Joshua from Sun has predicted that “2008 will be the year that client Java starts taking market share from Flash”. This is a pretty bold prediction reminding me of when I used to hear this same sort of statement about Desktop Linux… “1999 will be the year of Desktop Linux”.
Don’t get me wrong… I love Desktop Linux. Been using it since about 1993. And I love Java. Been using it since 1996.