All this recent work in ActionScript has got me thinking: where does Flash fit anymore?
The evolution of Flash has clearly been in the direction of a fully fledged programming language. I.e., increased complexity. It is not your ‘average’ designer’s tool anymore – without any disrespect to the design community, for which, as an avid consumer of design, I have a lot of respect. Flash still has a way to go to be a complete programming language (support for multithreading, direct O/S access for example), but at that point will it have lost its unique design orientation, and will it become just another dev kit? Can it compete to the .NET/Java/perhaps Ruby on Rails worlds on its own merits as a software development tool if it sheds its design (web, motion) orientation?
But even if it stays primarily a design tool: can it compete with the likes of MS Expression? Platform loyalties aside, Expression and XAML provide an extension into the interactive arena of a formidable development stack.
That Flash poses some problems to developers (which can be quite annoying in large projects especially, but large projects are what make a development environment a ‘serious’ tool) has been evident by the emergence of Laszlo and even Flex; Flash still remains powerful as a runtime rendering engine with unmatched ubiquity. However, I see the former as yet untested, and the latter as liable to come under attack from XAML. It will be interesting to see which direction Adobe wants to take it in, and I am waiting for more details about their Apollo initiative.
The ‘distributed software’ ecosystem would be something like this:
Systems: C/C++ code, platform specific. Software engineers’ domain. Includes apps such as databases.
‘Piping’: most everything else. Business rules-systems. .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python. Software architects’ domain. Some unmanaged/systems-level coding.
Front end: Flash, XAML, Looking Glass (?). Designers’ domain. Behavior coding, interfacing, front end logic, mash-ups, consuming web services.
