AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available in JS.
As others said Adobe is at fault here, same as Microsoft is at fault of not open sourcing Silverlight and now we end up with html5/js mess that was not designed for what is used.
Flex4 is really good and after you learn it you get good GUIs that are efficient and that are easy to reuse and much more efficiient then HHTML based GUIs
IIRC, the format for Silverlight output was well documented, and open. It was a zip file with a manifest, assets and JS. The down side is they didn't get the penetration. Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd hoped that Flash would have become when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was really pushing SVG before that, and my hope was that flash content would become a zip, with assets and a manifest, where 2D assets were svg, and the tweaning was something similar to CSS.
Either could have been adopted. Would still love to see an HTML "package" format that was similar, where the whole content and assets could be downloaded as a single container, and run offline easily like flash could.
Only Silverlight v1 was Javascript based. From version 2 upwards a small CLR implementation was the runtime. It allowed .net languages (C# and F# mainly) to be run.
Silverlight was not open source though and it was not cross platform either. Having Silverlight/.Net and Flash/Flex/Air open sourced and competing would have been great, as a copmpany I would have made money from the IDEs and tools, why you need to keep it proprietary and then kill it.
Silverlight was available on Mac and Windows, and Moonlight was available on Linux. Again, the plugin itself didn't have to be open-sourced, the format was, which is why Moonlight worked.
In my opinion having Linux support done by community and lagging behind in features and in release scheduling is not cross-platform, Flash had the advantage in this point, Adobe AIR also worked on linux until a point.
Do you think that having this platforms opened source would help or not the adoption? Looking at Java I see it is still going strong with plenty on languages, tools and libraries/frameworks still going strong.
My entire point wasn't that Silverlight was/wasn't open sourced... it was that the underlying structure was FAR closer to what I thought was a good package structure, compared to .SWF
Having Flash on iOS, even through the browser, would have allowed people to develop apps for iOS without going through Apple. It would also allow trivial Android porting. Flash was not in Apple's strategic interests.
It was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.
In retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007 or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to reject). This would have required starting the process in 2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in 2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open web standards were a joke.
The original iPhone was amazing in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the contemporary case to save it...
The real question I have is: Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do they provide most of the same features? I ask because that shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).
Adobe opened some parts like a compiler they were working on and the Flex SDK but Flash was not opened, this was a mistake, I mean they announced a few years ago that HTML is the future so why not put a few people work on Flash code, remove the parts they can't open and make it open source, similar with Open JDK. It is weird they support AIR but Flex was donated to Apache.
I agree, but look at electron apps, the situation is not better, Flash is similar to a game engine so it had a "game loop" running at a certain FPS. I coded AIR apps, and I know Flash was misused in websites but we have same misuse now with JS where sites with text and images don't work without JS, You had the option to turn off Flash but can you afford to turn off JS>
Adobe is at fault, they should have open source it or make improvements/
Don't forget E4X, it's here in AS3 as a first class citizen, while every single browser vendors either did not bother to implement it (google) or deprecated it after some times (mozilla).
It was quite nice to use client-side in Flash and AIR for such things as SOAP etc. but it is also quite powerful when used server-side for web scrapping and HTML templating.
AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available in JS.
I wrote this a couple of months back: https://medium.com/@Pier/ecmascript-4-was-too-ahead-of-its-t...