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Comment by tensafefrogs | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Javascript isn't as mature as Actionscript 3 feels, but would you really choose to build a website or web application in Flash over Javascript even if it meant a poorer user experience for your users?

Your users don't care about your opinion of Javascript's syntax.

More focus on Javascript and the tools available will only help improve the language faster, and I believe Flash has already made a huge impact (good!) on the Javascript language.

Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?

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As far as I know Javascript (EMCA script) is older than Actionscript , so if actionscript feels more 'mature' despite being younger and only developed by one company doesn't that tell you that there's something wrong with the Javascript as a whole?

I agree though that it would be awesome if adobe created a suite of Javascript products that focused on developing creative content in a similar way to what flash did.

I think the reasons most people hate flash are that the platform itself works poorly on anything other than windows , this could be fixed in part by Adobe simply open sourcing the flash VM.

The other reason is that lots of flash developers used the platform to create crap like flash intros and obnoxious advertising , that won't exactly go away with HTML5/JS.

I like your optimism about Javascript's future, but I think it's a bit naive. Even if Javascript was AS3 today, we would still have to deal with a lack of cross browser consistency, the ancient text document oriented DOM, a lack of the same powerful graphical APIs found in Flash, and the lack of a standard top level object oriented structure (as found in the Flash platform with MXML, SWFs, SWCs, symbol and timeline architecture, etc.)

I'm not just hoping I'm counting on Adobe or someone delivering a good Javascript IDE that mimics OOP design, and I'm keeping an eye on Google's Dart project, but even after that I'm not expecting the experience to be nearly as smooth or creatively liberating as Flash.

Mxml is a development tool, you could compile it down to html and css with a javascript api. Look at extjs. It provides a crossbrowser OO flexlike api on top of the DOM. Javascript is good enough as a target language for a compiler. I expect adobe to keep the dev tools but change the output to be pluginfree.

Yes there's a lot that a company could do fake a good OOP architecture which compiles down to standards soup, but such solutions tend to result in tons of extra generated crap. Dart compiles to JS... with a a simple "Hello World" app coming out as 17,000 lines of code!

Plus not having the structure as part of the standard will make iterative development a nightmare. Instead of being reliant on a proprietary runtime (like Flash Player) we are reliant on proprietary compilers and libraries. How is that better?

One of the biggest advantages of flash was that beyond a few DOM wrangling capabilities it basically threw away the rest of the browser and was really more akin to a Java applet than being part of the browser.

This meant that even somebody using IE6 can have a good experience with a flash app, assuming their flash is upto date.

What annoys me with HTML5/JS apps is I constantly see people showing off demos of something cool they did with the "open" HTML5/JS tools. Then I load their demo and it's all like "hey, sorry your not using the latest version of Chrome come back when you've installed it"

Hopefully this will get better over time , but you've still got IE dragging it's feet and doing things a bit differently + Microsoft's habit of dropping support for new versions in older OSes.

Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation otherwise I can see this becoming a nightmare and everyone having to keep multiple versions of multiple browsers installed just to run all the apps they need.

Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation

Heh, this would be an ideal situation, but good luck trying to get them to agree on that. The browser wars are not over yet, who knows if they ever will be.

We thought that the Web would be that final platform that would give us the ability to write our app once, and then make it available instantly on all operating systems. Well, technically, we got that. Except now we have to worry about browser incompatibilities. We didn't solve the problem of cross-platform compatibility. We just have a different set of platforms today.

What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers. But seeing that this magical language would probably also need to support arcane versions of various browsers I don't see that happening any time soon.

> What wee need is a language that will do for web development what Java has done for development in general in 90s - something that will allow us to write our apps once, and have them display perfectly on all major browsers.

I thought we did have that and it was called gasp Java!

Yeah, but applets never really took off, for numerous reasons. One of them being that you needed to have a Java browser plug-in installed in order for them to work. This new language I'm talking about would either need to be understood natively by browsers or it would need to compile the code to something that the browsers would understand and be able to display natively (without any additional plug-ins). At the moment, that's HTML+JavaScript, but if browser vendors could agree on some other, common language that would be supported consistently across all browsers and that would provide a richer experience, that would be an ideal situation. Don't forget that the purpose of HTML was never to give us the ability to create applications, it was to display documents, which were the basis of the early web. However, now we need something that will allow us to create rich web apps that have a consistent look & feel and functionality across all browsers without the need to write additional code to cover all the quirks of specific browsers. Maybe something like Flash, but that's open, understood natively and works equally good across all browsers and operating systems. But that, of course, is just wishful thinking.

I think you're right on all counts here. A big issue I see is that the General Flash Hatred causes people to not acknowledge that there are places where Flash is clearly superior for the users' experience.

> Maybe Adobe will give us our next great Javascript editor?

That would be welcomed with open arms. But why not continue to use Flash until this comes around, instead of slowly killing it without a decent replacement?

Though I never used Flash professionally, it has been the most fun to use for games and any other side projects that involve some sort of visual control. JavaScript isn't even close yet.

Well, I have been using Adobe Dreamweaver as a fancy text editor for coding Javascript, but I hesitate to call it a great one. I suspect what you are looking for is a great jQuery/jQuery UI editor (i.e. a rich interface framework) that also happens to support javascript.

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