FITC Amsterdam 2012: Open web technologies as an alternative to plugins

This is a short recap of a presentation made during FITC Amsterdam 2012. Kudos for the presentation content goes to the presenter. Please use the resource links at the end of this post to get more information from the source.

Michal Budzynski, a web game developer from Poland, shared some of his HTML5 come backs to typical doubts about HTML5 related technologies coming from Flash developers. Since Michal is not a Flash developer himself he had to ask some of his Flash developer friends about why they still preferred Flash over HTML5. These are some of their most usual reasons for favoring Flash coupled with plausible HTML5 alternatives suggested by Michal.

Flash developer: With Flash you can access the users camera.
Michal: HTML5 has the getUserMedia API.

Flash Developer: Flash can go full screen
Michal: With HTML5 you can call requestFullScreen on any page element

Flash developer: Flash can create desktop apps
Michal: You can also do that using XUL

Flash developer: There are Flash debugging tools
Michal: There are similar tools in browsers, firebug in Firefox, developer tools in Chrome, Venkman javascript debugger in FireFox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Venkman).

Flash developer: You can create P2P with Flash
Michal: You can use Web Sockets, Easy Web Sockets http://easywebsocket.org/ or upcoming WebRTC http://www.webrtc.org

Flash developer: For Flash there are services like Mochimedia and Kongregate for integrating with social media etc.
Michal: Similar services are starting to surface also on the HTML side, like bluevia.

Flash developer: Flash has DRM
Michal: Google are working on specs to secure web content. The open web community takes pride in staying open.

Flash developer: Flash has decent development tools
Michal: There are good alternatives for HTML5; cloud9ide.com, bly.sk, gordon/shumway and bikeshed.

All in all another one of those Flash vs HTML5 presentations. On several of the points mentioned above Flash is still ahead, HTML5 is catching up but there is still some time until new specifications turn into stable technologies with decent browser support. What I mostly take with me from this presentation is a few of the useful resources mentioned for HTML5 development, like the cloud9 IDE and the Venkman JavaScript debugger.

Resources:

• michalbe.blogspot.com