The old debate over HTML versus Flash has become stale. A new debate, however, has surfaced.
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) like Adobe Flash are feeling the heat as competitors move in and are expected to gain wide adoption among developers.
Adobe Flash, initially developed by Macromedia, has had widespread adoption and can be used by developers to stream audio and video and create rich-media advertisements, presentations, games and a slew of other functions.
It is considered a popular software platform and is used by more than two million people, reaching 99 percent of Internet-enabled systems and devices, including Windows, Mac OS X, Pocket PC, Palm OS, and Solaris, according to a June 2008 survey by Millward Brown, a research company. Nearly 99 percent of U.S. Web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have Flash Player installed, with 45 to 56 percent having the latest version, according to NPD Group.
Adobe keeps pressing on with Flash and has included 3-D graphics, special effects, hardware-accelerated graphics, and text control in its Flash Player Version 10, currently in beta version 2.
Calls made to Adobe were not returned in time for publication.
All that is great for Adobe, but can Flash continue to press forward amid the heat from new competitors?
Microsoft is a major competitor. Earlier this year the software behemoth released Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser and cross-device plug-in. Silverlight supports rich applications, including vector graphics, animation and audio-video playback.
Others, however, describe it as an alternative to Flash. Already it is being used by early adopters, including NBC Sports, which is currently using Silverlight to stream the Olympics, and Cirque de Soleil. Similar to Flash, Silverlight has had 1.5 million downloads a day, according to Microsoft.
Another challenger in the RIA arena is AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). With AJAX,…