In 10 years time, Flash will be a forgotten technology

by Cameron

Well, with any sort of luck at least. The reason for Flash's timely demise is this: http://processingjs.org/
 
Processing, and the Javascript implementation of it above, is an open source programming language that allows developers to programmatically build animations, images and interactive elements. The Javascript implementation uses the new HTML5 canvas element to allow users to build virtually whatever graphical interface they can imagine.
 
This presents a bit of a problem for Flash, as Processing lets you do a lot of what Flash does but directly in the browser, without embedding an external application. It's also completely open source. It's tremendously exciting stuff, I know a lot of developers out there don't really LIKE Flash, they certainly don't want to fall in to the Silverlight trap, but what else can you do? Clients want pretty animations, and up until now, that's always meant Flash.
 
None of this is set to completely replace Flash just yet - all of the real browsers support it, but it simply won't work in IE until MS gets around to building a canvas element. As the HTML5 spec stabilizes and becomes more useful, the implementations will come, and things like Processing are just going to get more and more powerful - it's easy to see a day in the not-too-distant future where the major JS frameworks have neat integration points with Processing and other canvas-manipulating packages, and when that day comes, when JS-based graphical manipulation is commonplace and standardized, what becomes of Flash? I'm sure it'll still have its place, somewhere, but if Adobe is hoping to maintain the marketshare it has right now, they're going to have to invent some pretty impressive tricks.