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Not sure about the advantages you mention for Flash. It has no 3D or physics (there are just some libraries that try to fake it), and you don’t need Flash to set up connections (with HTML5, we now even get two-way connections with web sockets). We ended up using Unity for a recent animation project because Flash just didn’t cut it for real-time 3D (http://www.allurefx.com/Projects/Mergex/Mergex.html).

The 99% penetration number we keep seeing is really for desktops; Flash is nowhere on smartphones. Heck, even my Android phone doesn’t support it, forget about iPhone/iPad. And even on desktops, JavaScript has even higher penetration. I.e., if you design with just HTML/CSS/JS, your stuff is more likely to be seen, certainly on smart phones. Which is why we recently switched from Flash/Flex to AJAX (with GWT).

I agree that Unity is far better for 3D work.

What is cross-platform HTML5 socket support like compared to Flash? Surely it doesn't have the pentration to seriously use it in the real world? Where is the high-performance binary communication format in HTML5 sockets (like AMF)? Can I send compressed strongly-typed objects from my back-end or am I stuck with converting and sending bloated XML?

Flash 10.1 will be everywhere on smartphones this year. RIM, Palm and Android are all locked in. Probably Windows Mobile 7 as well. We'll see what happens to the iPhone and iPad when it has some serious competition. I'm not that fussed about not having Flash on the iPhone but I think expectations for the iPad to be a full-featured web device will be much higher.

I agree that if a similarly-featured cross-platform AJAX solution is available, it makes sense to go with that. However, there's a lot of use cases where Flex/Flash is the better choice (dealing with video, audio, image manipulation, thousands of data records, etc.).

You *can* do strongly typed binary exchange with AJAX. E.g., we're working on a project (Herdcall) that has two kinds of clients - Android and web (desktop/mobile). Server side is Google App Engine with Java code, and both Android and Web clients are Java. All RPC communication is through strongly typed (Java client to Java server) exchange. Specifically, on Android we're serializing the Java objects using standard Java serialization; and with the Web version, the exchange uses the GWT RPC mechanism. Both the formats are strongly typed and binary, so the streams are pretty tight.

BTW, if anyone's interested in Flex talking to Google App Engine through AMF, check out my tutorial http://blog.allurefx.com/2009/05/cloud-to-ria-accessing-google-app.html that uses GraniteDS.

Yes, GWT RPC is cool (and another reason to use GWT if you're taking the AJAX path and have a Java backend) but it's my understanding that it doesn't support sockets (directly from the browser), which is what I was referring too.

Why Flash Is Going Away

High Adobe license fees to tools and streaming servers.

SteveJ wants devs to write native code for his iDevices. If apps are cross-platform why not buy a Droid instead?

Security holes, bugs, etc.

Adobe removed license fees on SWF and RTMP in 2008. Flash is no different to HTML coding in this respect. If you want a professional grade tool, shell out some dollars. If you want a free tool, use FlashDevelop. If you want a professional streaming server, use FMS or Wowza. If you want a free streaming server, use Red5.

SteveJ will find this year that there's a lot of competition for his iDevices and they'll all be running Flash 10.1 by the end of the year.

Occasional security holes although certainly far less problems than those caused by XSS.

To discount the AS libraries is ridiculous. You might as well cut jQuery out of the JavaScript equation when comparing advantages/disadvantages. You could also say PHP/Java/Python/etc are a horrible web languages since we're not counting libraries that make them useful... Oh, sorry, you want to use PEAR? Doesn't count. Lucene? Zend, Cake, Symfony, etc. all external libs, so they don't count... You might as well stop using Java because forget using an Apache/JBOSS projects.

HTML5 will be great for Flash developers, the best thing since Silverlight. Hopefully, it will force Adobe to innovate to keep their lead. They've already started addressing the efficiency and load times. Starting with 10.1 Adobe started building the mobile version first and then basing the desktop version on that, instead of the reverse like in the past. More importantly it will light a fire under Flash devs/designers to use best practices. There are many tools both built into AS3 and provided by open projects that address the short comings of Flash. SEO and accessibility are possible, and with little effort in AS3. You just can't be lazy. So many of the common complaints were addressed in Flash 8/9 but the designers and devs keep on plugging away with their horrible habits.

Under section "Source of the Flash Hate"
This list looks to me as severe disadvantages.