The news of the day is that Adobe is pulling their Flash Player from the Google Play (aka Android) store. Meaning that unless you already have Flash Player, or someone conveniently puts the .apk online (which I’m sure will happen), Android users don’t get Flash.
While yes, this day was coming, it’s still a significant development. For many it seems to be that “Oh, now HTML5 will replace Flash.” But it’s not one-to-one equivalent. Most developers understand this, but others might not — the group of technologies that we term “HTML5” are in fact still constantly evolving.
As a Twitter friend said when I asked about Montage:
@pamasaur you mean Yet Another MV* JavaScript Framework? 🙂
— Antonio Yon (@oldmantone) August 8, 2012
There isn’t a “standard library” of HTML5. There’s not even really an IDE. JavaScript only behaves in an object-oriented fashion if you’re treating it that way. It is not one to one to Flash. And interestingly, while Flash is moving off of browsers and into apps … HTML5 is there too, Adobe.
I find it interesting to think about this shift in the context of shifts from other languages. I didn’t find any data on say, the shift as Java became more popular, but I did find this survey of programmers and why they learned languages very interesting. Tip: Make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page so you can add ActionScript and JavaScript to the data.