Soup of the Day

Flash, opened up by the community

Adobe Flash, as it is now known, has been around for almost ten years, first making an appearance in December 1996. Flash was originally a tool to provide vector based graphics and animation to web sites. During the early years as a vector based animation tool, Flash lacked any real programming capabilities, although a simple scripting language was emerging.

Having been a user of flash since version three, I have witnessed this animation tool transform into a programming language and rich internet application platform. The changes have been astounding. What was once a simple, and rather quirky, scripting language has grown and developed into a fully blown object-orientated language. The Flash Player is now distributed with almost every browser, and is supported on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Version 7 currently, 8.5 coming soon). A ‘lite’ version of the player is pre-installed on a number of modern mobile phones and PDA’s.

So Flash has arrived. But until recently there was a problem. Flash was proprietary, owned and controlled solely by Macromedia (now Adobe), ensuring that if you wanted to create Flash content, you either had to buy Macromedia Flash or a 3rd party solution. Either way, Macromedia were getting a royalty.

But recently things started to change. Firstly, Macromedia launched their < labs > site, which allowed the community to try and test new products before they were launched - for free! Then they announced something even more unbelievable, the next version of Flex would support Eclipse, the open source IDE originally from IBM. This meant that anyone could download Eclipse, install the Macromedia Flex component and start creating Flex code, all for the price of an internet connection.

While Flex was receiving a lot of attention, Flash has been quietly going on as a proprietary plug-in requiring Adobe’s IDE to create code and compile it. Recently, there has been movement by the OpenSource community to release Flash from its shackles and give it back to the people.

Two projects in particular have recently caught my attention and I have been happily creating simple Flash applications without ever touching Flash 8.

Firstly there is ASDT, or ActionScript Development Tool, a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. This allows development of actionscript classes in the Eclipse environment with easy, code-highlighted text for functions, variables and everything else you would expect. Some argue that ASDT is better than Flash 8 at this task.
Secondly, you will need an open source flash compiler. For this you can use MTASC that allows you to create SWF movies from a bunch of .as classes.

Using those two tools, anybody can program and create Flash applications without the need to ever open Flash 8. A number of open source servers have emerged to host additional Flash content, that you would otherwise have to pay top dollar for. One example is Red 5, an open source development that allows the live streaming of flash video content.
For more information, check out these sites and articles.

Open Source Flash
Far beyond Open Source Flash development
ASDT
MTASC
Eclipse