Macromedia Flash technology allows animations, forms, and other interactive features to be embedded in Web pages. The software is designed to provide rich Web experiences across multiple platforms.
Site designers can use Flash to integrate high-quality video, data applications and advanced interactive, multimedia content into their sites. The popular software is arguably the world’s most pervasive Internet software platform, used by over one million professionals and reaching more than 97 percent of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide, as well as a wide range of devices.
Flash is popular because it is a free plug in, which comes standard with the majority of Internet browsers. Due to the software’s near ubiquity, development of Flash content, applications and video has also become standard fare for Internet developers. Developers appreciate Flash not only because of its rich visual capacity, but also because of its more complex programming development capabilities.
Using Flash, a developer can rapidly build out effective, data robust applications. The Flash development environment allows Web clients to connect to data with scriptable, data binding that supports Web services, simple object access protocol, extensible markup language and relational databases.
The development environment even provides its own native object-oriented programming language called ActionScript 2.0, which for ease-of-use is based upon Javascript. Programmers using ActionScript can build applications in a familiar forms-based development environment, which is similar to other visual development tools such as VisualBasic.
Macromedia Flash also provides a wide range of ancillary features. One of the most interesting is Macromedia FlashPaper. FlashPaper allows designers to convert printable files into documents that are transmitted through Flash.
Audio and video is also a key component of Flash. Within the programming environment, developers can convert Apple QuickTime files into optimized video that can be transmitted using Flash.
The programming environment, Flash MX, allows designers and developers to integrate video, along with text, audio, and graphics into impressive, rich experiences that deliver superior results for interactive marketing and presentations, electronic learning, and application user interfaces. Designers must purchase the software to gain access to the sophisticated developer tools.
Once Flash files are developed (usually, the files have a SWF extension), they can be uploaded to any Web hosting platform. The flash plug-in within the client’s Web browser will download and interpret the SWF file. SWF files render very fast because Flash draws graphics on the fly, rather than storing text or graphics as complete images, although Flash can also display photographic images and illustrations.
For deployment of more sophisticated Flash applications, such as video, users might want to consider finding a Web host that specializes in Flash streaming. Such a host would run Macromedia's Flash Server. Flash Server permits site builders to create and deploy streaming media and rich communication functionality in Web sites and Internet applications. The server allows site administrators to stream multi-way audio, video and data and create multi-user communications features. A server deployment is usually quite expensive, as most high-end Flash streaming is deployed by content delivery networks.
