processing.js does it mean the death of Flash/Silverlight?
May 21
About 2 weeks ago John Resig, the maker of jQuery, released processing.js, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. Porting it to javascript made it available to a wider audience. I saw the processing project about 2 years ago but didn’t see much use at the time since it was open source but required a software to code it.
In the near future it might not change much things, but as it becomes better known and people start working/improving it i’m pretty sure we have a strong Flash/Silverlight killer here. First of all you don’t need to install any 3rd party application, it’s straight javascript. Secondly, developers won’t need to buy expensive licenses to work with it. And third, the javascript community is already pretty big, once people starts jumping on the wagon, the train will be hard to stop.
The main problem right now is that you have Silverlight that tries to steal market from Flash, but Flash penetation is so big that it’s nearly impossible to overcome. Developers simply won’t start developing Silverlight applications because no one asks for it. This is where processing.js come in play, the penetration is even stronger than flash, and you don’t need any kind of license to develop it.
In my opinion, at the moment, the only real use for Flash on the web is for video/audio players. And it’s something that might change in the near future since HTML 5 already has a video and audio element planned what will be the use of flash?