Flash as Widget Technology by Michael Crampton

Preamble // Flash History // Definition of a Widget // About the Author // Footnotes // Prologue

Preamble (top)

The much touted and much maligned web animation package has seen its day of sparkle. From the huge influx of Flash animations at independent film festivals to Jacob Neilson's "Flash is 99% Bad", no one seems quite sure where Flash fits into the market. Macromedia shows strategies as cunning as Microsoft's heyday. Adobe flutters the market with new releases, but seems slow to compete directly with Flash (LiveMotion not withstanding).

Flash started as an animation package, and to this day maintains its ability to quickly produce on and off-line animations. From version 3 to version 5 however, Macromedia veered the application towards the programming market. Rumors abounded that Flash would someday merge with Shockwave, but still the differences between Director and Flash far outweigh the similarities. Director is a robust multimedia program, while Flash exhibits severe limitations in its capacity to stream large files. While Lingo offers a wide variety of high level programming controls, Flash's ActionScript is very pointed towards specific types of functionality.

The best way to understand the present is to look at the past, and the best way to understand a technology is to look at what people do with it. So let's look at a brief history of Flash development between versions 4 and 5.

Flash History (top)

Balthaser Online pretty much started things off. This San Francisco-based design firm was among the first to publish "high impact web content" with Flash 4. Their we-can-type-faster-than-you-can-read style of rapidly changing graphics and spinning 3D logos seems an easy transition from overdone motion graphics, but at the time it moved the bar of web animation up by several notches.

The entire Balthaser site was done in Flash. Content sections could seamlessly move from one to the next. If the user did not directly interact with the site, then the content would continue to play like an unending commercial. Blocks of text that no one ever read were replaced by text animation synchronized with the ubiquitous techno beat throbbing away in the background. All of it was juicy stuff that left audiences amazed and wanting more.

A second important aspect of the original Balthaser site was the jobs section. A refreshing break from the quick tempo of the rest of the site, Balthaser's plea for talent took the form of a 40's style black and white war propaganda film, complete with frame jitters and scratch lines. As cute as the film was, the narrator's voice saying "help us stamp out the scourge of the dreaded HTML" and "we need more Flash production to turn the tide to victory" firmly implanted the idea that Flash was a replacement to HTML.

This idea spread throughout the community quickly. People began to consider Flash as a novel web delivery software. Macromedia, for a time, encouraged this view. Systematically funneling droves of would-be web animators into a user base of hobbyists. What they found, however, was a software package with limited streaming capabilities and a less than ideal user interface, but these subtle facts were not enough to discourage enthusiasts in the face of the constant barrage of innovations that would take place over the next six months.

The next big name to hit the hot lists was Ego Media. This big headed design firm from New York city almost single-handedly created the subgenera of Flash development called vector video. By running short video segments through an extensive series of applications, they converted each frame to a vector object, thus making them importable into Flash. (4)

Then came Rand Interactive. Another New York-based design firm, they were the first to code a trigonometry engine in Flash 4. A fairly impressive feat considering the almost nonexistent math functions available in ActionScript at the time. With trigonometry came a whole world of three-dimensional tricks that kept audiences coming back. Rand also began to experiment with navigational metaphors, giving the user a navigational ball that could be thrown around the screen, rather than the conventional menu based systems.

At this point the waters start to muddy. Flash sites start popping up everywhere. Flash introductions became all the rage (skipintro.com). Turtleshell can be noted for being the first to effectively create a web environment, akin to the unrealized promises of VRML. Dennis Interactive should be noted for utilizing Flash in a mature way, creating both interesting animation and unique navigation.

But unfortunately, these are not the most telling uses of Flash 4. Tiffany serves as a better indicator of where Flash would go with version 5. Tiffany was the first to use Generator, a new Macromedia database tool. With Generator they were able to build the first Flash site to effectively display a large amount of content.

Then, with the debut of Flash 5, Macromedia makes a dramatic shift in its marketing of Flash technology. Up to this point, Flash had been seen as a replacement to HTML that allowed web designers far greater levels of creativity and control. But Macromedia also owns Dreamweaver, which is still by far the most widely used HTML editor. Macromedia had two products that seemed to compete with each other.

Other market factors were coming to bear. With AOL’s acquisition of Netscape (1), the browser wars had all but come to a close, which gave Netscape's Javascript, a stable development base. Also, Dan Steinman and the like began to open source cross-browser compatible Javascript APIs. This happened at just about the same time that the Wearethey Society officially changed the meaning of DHTML from "database driven web content" to "dynamic Javascript", and web application development studios across the country (2) began locking programmers in dark cellars. Feeding them fifty-dollar bills and coke till they emerged with new browser functionality that didn't require a plugin.

Definition of a Widget (top)

Dictionary.com defines a widget as "an unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article". A definition the Wearethey Society also deemed insufficient for the digital era. Most web applications these days are built with widgets. Widgets are to web application design what transcendental numbers are to mathematics; the real pieces of a theoretical system.

Through technologies like ASP, JSP, and XML, web application developers were finally given the ability to bring the full power of object-oriented programming to web content without the inefficiency of CGI. The HTML seen by a user could be sliced, diced, and deep-fried on each page served. Server-side applets could do all the difficult data preparation and output the consumables in some easily digestible form such as HTML.

But different applications are required to produce different functionality. While one is busy determining whether to sort a list in ascending or descending order, another worries about which banner ad should be displayed. Each applet then spits out a small piece of HTML that is eventually combined into the larger page. Each of these smaller pieces of HTML is considered a widget. Thus a widget can then be defined as a small piece of a webpage that does something.

Javascript is primed for widget technology. Java developers and other back-end types couldn't care less about how information is displayed (3). Javascript widgets allow much of the display-based data juggling to be pushed to the client side. For instance, rather than coding a Java applet to display calendar data in HTML, the Java applet can simply pass the calendar data to a Javascript widget and let the widget figure out how to best display that data for this particular user.

Widgets are not a display architecture. They do not deliver content directly from the server. Widgets display the content that the server gives them, adding basic programming logic to the client-side. They act as a conduit for data access, but are mainly focused on interactivity with that data. They decide how the data should be displayed rather than what data to display. Widget technology opened the enterprise-level web application market to Flash. It could compliment rather than compete with Dreamweaver.

Use Flash for what its good at or Macromedia will spite thee

Flash is not good at complicated data structures as would be required for content laden site development. Flash is good at interactivity and animation. The ability to write object independent functions and save function libraries gives Flash the same API potential as Javascript.

Nearly half of the ActionScript commands added in Flash 5 deal with XML data handling and XML socket connections. Combined with direct variable transport between CGI, JSP, ASP, Cold Fusion, and PHP, Flash’s ability to act as a data conduit far exceeds that of Javascript, which still requires a page refresh to talk to the server. The premier of Ultradev and the purchase of Cold Fusion put Macromedia in direct competition with Microsoft's Interdev. A position that will encourage them to further integrate and improve Flash’s abilities in this arena.

About the Author (top)

Michael currently works as a Flash and Director Programming instructor for Multimedia Enterprise. He has built digital installations for SXSW Interactive, CinemaTexas Film Festival, and the Austin Museum of Digital Art. He won the 2001 Texas Interactive Media Award for Technical Creative Innovation.

Footnotes (top)

(1) You could, of course, claim that AOL and Microsoft are in competition, but this would be like saying that McDonald's and Burger King are in competition. Underdogs are the real threat in American capitalism.

(2) I'd say across the globe, but web development outside the U.S. is a fairly new phenomena.

(3) Site the dire state of user interface.

(4) Vector video is slowly becoming antiquated in the face of broadband and SWF movie encoders and import utilities such as Flix.

Prologue (top)

To say that Flash is a widget technology rather than a display architecture, like HTML, doesn't mean that HTML is the only display architecture that Macromedia endorses. Quite to the contrary, Flash is now importable into both Authorware and Director, both of which are robust and viable display architectures.

In many ways Shockwave is what everyone thought Flash was. And with the merger of Shockwave.com and Atom Films, Macromedia has successfully translated a somewhat disheartened Flash hobbyist base into a fervent Shockwave user base. Flash's ability to quickly produce content animations has also fostered it's growth in the e-learning market.

All of this leaves little question about Macromedia's future, though Macromedia's ruthless market tactics do leave some question as to exactly what that future holds.