Flash Websites,

off.the.walls

Are these any use thinking of teaching myself some action script and i think theres some java in there with functions and all that kinda stuff. Is it worth my time or should i just go and learn other web coding languages?

cheers
evan.

millymash12

Defo better off learning something like Wordpress, .css, .php and html 5 instead. Flash is nice to learn and fun as a bonus in my opinion.

off.the.walls

Doing a course in html,css,java atm ist fun

Feathers

off.the.walls wrote: »

Doing a course in html,css,java atm ist fun

Hi Evan,

glad you're enjoying the web course. I'd say you can get some mileage out of ActionScript if you have it, though I wouldn't go out of my way to learn it at this stage. It's very much had its heyday. Was at a Flash conference recently and a lot of talks were along the lines of "don't worry, it'll be easy to pick up JavaScript".

The main bonus AS devs have at the moment is experience in animations and 3D — just in terms of thinking along those lines. That's still very new in the web sphere, but coming along.

I'd recommend sticking with JS, which is on the up (Win8 will allow native JS apps for instance). If you have free time and want to do some flashy stuff (terrible pun intended), check out Processing too, which is quite nice and has a JavaScript library version as well.

Flash's market share will continue to diminish, as HTML5/Javascript develops. The idea of browser plugins, that need to be installed and kept up to date, seems to be out of favour. Even Adobe realises that the game is changing, and they're doing some interesting things with Edge.

It seems like frameworks like jQuery and plugins for these frameworks are starting to replace some of the more complex things ActionScript can do. I guess ActionScript was built to do the things flash does well, and evolved over a long period.

The Javascript approach will be different. Javascript was built with a less specialised remit, and there's no commercial entity like Adobe making for-profit decisions about the languge. As the language is so open, lots of people are making plugins and libraries - some of them doing the same thing in different ways. The jQuery/plugin approach may get messy and fragmented, with different developers using different plugins for (say) parallax.

Interesting times ahead.

BarackPyjama

If you're considering a career in web design/development, don't bother with Flash. As SBS says, there will be less and less of a demand for it in the future. Any decent Flash developers with any kind of foresight have already up-skilled to other, more widely used technologies (Java, PHP, Ruby, HTML5, etc)

off.the.walls

cheers for the replies, am just about to finish a six week course in html css jquery and other web design languages didnt realise alot of the flash stuff can be done with jquery.

BarackPyjama

off.the.walls wrote: »

cheers for the replies, am just about to finish a six week course in html css jquery and other web design languages didnt realise alot of the flash stuff can be done with jquery.

A lot of it can and what can't can generally be done using HTML5 (e.g. video). The web will be a less 'flashy' place without Flash and I'll miss it in some ways. In other ways though, it gave idiots the ability to produce unrestricted tripe on the web and for that alone, I'm glad to see the end of it.