HTML Target for AIR (WebGL / WebAssembly)

[phonefusionryan]

@chris.campbell What are your thoughts about this?

There is a Feature Request on the tracker on Adobe https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/AIR-4178275 

To me this is honestly THE #1 feature that Adobe should be working on. For so long I decided to stick with AIR/Flash because of it's ability to output to Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and the browser... saying to clients "let me build you a true cross platform solution".   But with the CLEAR browser decline in support for the Flash Player, I have many clients saying the dreaded "so what about html5".

I believe if Adobe wants AIR to remain 1 of the top contenders in cross platform development this MUST happen.

Regardless of the votes that appear on the tracker, can someone from Adobe comment on this? Have you guys seen the flood of votes. Are you deciding? if you could just acknowledge you see it and are thinking about it, It would put so many people at ease.

[ASWC]

Not gonna happen for multiple reasons the first being that HTML5 support is far from perfect between browsers especially IE. But a project like the one in this video generates 0 interest and for me that seems contradictory to the request in this thread. Is it really HTML5 you want or is it just not having to do any work? If it's the second then it all makes more sense to me.

This is literal as3 to typescript/javascript/webgl conversion.

[zwetan_uk]

ASWC  wrote

Not gonna happen for multiple reasons the first being that HTML5 support is far from perfect between browsers especially IE. But a project like the one in this video generates 0 interest and for me that seems contradictory to the request in this thread. Is it really HTML5 you want or is it just not having to do any work? If it's the second then it all makes more sense to me.

This is literal as3 to typescript/javascript/webgl conversion.

the thing is that converting AS3 to TypeScript is not something new

already been tried many times ... and when things get complicated people abandon the project

now a video is nice but having an open source project somewhere where people can participate and contribute would be nicer.

That said, I do think people, as you mentioned, don't want to do any work, they do want a magic button,

instead of publishing a SWF they just want to publish whatever blob of HTML/CSS/JS/WASM that can just works in the browser

Personally I do think Apache Royale would be the best solution, eg. re-implement the Flash API in JS, allow some options to render to canvas/SVG/openGL etc. but even that it is a big project, I would not see it happening, not from a solo dev, maybe from a community of dev, but imho unlikely to happen.

I don't see a lot of people contributing to OSS I mainly see people complaining "that does not exists, do it for me!"

[rewb0rn]

Hi,

as I wrote earlier, Haxe + OpenFL is a great workaround for us. OpenFL is an open source project that implements the Flash API for different targets like Flash, HTML5 and others. Besides the project maintainers there are a good number of people that a) sponsor the project financially and b) create pull requests for features that were not existing, yet. We are doing both. Just to tackle your argument that people just want something without giving anything. That does not seem to be the case at least for OpenFL.

The state of OpenFL in HTML5 is also very solid. Of course adjustments need to be made to publish a Flash game for HTML5, but we are on a good way of releasing games with HTML5. Currently in the debugging / polishing phase.

Cheers

[ASWC]

Making a framework of that kind for specific projects (we converted our 200+ flash game to HTML5 with it) is easier than making a public one that fits everything, still that was 6 months of work. But the first time I posted this here one or 2 years ago at the request of someone I got that person interest and that was it. I would have eventually looked into making a public version if there was some driving interest but there's really none. So yeah they want a magic button and they want Adobe AIR team low budget to pay for it and throw in webassembly target while they are at it. I can only imagine the total indifference this produces on the AIR team.

You know this as much as I do, this community use to have bunch of very active forums all over the place, now they get a couple barely alive. There used to be a lot of jobs in AIR, now good luck finding one. There used to be tons of stackoverflow questions daily on AIR, now there's 3 or 4, ect ... This community is not growing, it's dying and AIR with it. (and I'm guessing I'm gonna be insulted again for saying this cos it's now totally fine to insult people)

[zwetan_uk]

Rarykos  wrote

I'm not letting this go.

LOL OK ...

Rarykos  wrote

Adobe MUST create an HTML target for AIR if it wants to stay competitive.

Less and less people use AIR for mobile apps, other engines provide more functionality.

Why would anyone use Adobe AIR to create desktop apps? Come on, now.

And there's no follow up for web content. Clearly, Animate webGL support is more basic and LESS user friendly than AS2 10 years ago.

What are you doing Adobe?

Except you're missing the purpose of Adobe AIR: to be independent of the browser, also to provide an outside of the browser experience.

see this old Wired Article when Adobe AIR 1.0 was launched

Adobe’s Kevin Lynch on AIR’s Open-Source Road to the Desktop

This week, Adobe released version 1.0 of it’s Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR for short) a mechanism that allows applications created for the internet to run on the desktop completely independent of the web browser and across multiple operating systems. You can read our initial coverage of AIR’s release on the Compiler blog.
...

Kevin Lynch:

I think that AIR and the browser are complimentary. They’re going to co-exist. If you think about the experience in the browser right now, it’s going from site to site, from page to page. It’s somewhat of an ephemeral experience. For people who rely on particular applications on the internet and use them frequently, they want to give them a greater presence in the computing environment. Those are the applications I imagine you’d want to collect on your computer. Those would run on AIR. Then they can be in your Start menu or in your Dock. They can notify you when things change. You can have a closer relationship with those applications than you would in the context of a browser.

E-mail applications are a great example. There’s a huge move of e-mail applications to the web, but in the browser, you need to be online to access your archived communications. You can’t be notified of new messages that are urgent unless you have the browser window open. So it’s about letting those applications you depend on live up to their full potential and have the richest experience.

Some would argue that maybe the browser should just do everything. I think it’s hard for a piece of software to be the end-all, be-all of everything. Psychologically, I think it’s a lot more natural for people to use an application the way they traditionally have done, which is to go into the Applications menu and launch it.

emphasis mine

so you see, making an HTML target for Adobe AIR is kind of the opposite of the original vision.

Adobe AIR have been built to run outside of the browser to be able to not be limited by the web and browser tech,
to not be an ephemeral experience that is accessible only by a URL but at the opposite to be an experience that integrate with the desktop (and later mobile).

I will continue on the e-mail applications as an example, maintaining a web browser app like gmail is a total nightmare,

only few big companies can allocate the resources to do that, and yet on mobile you find native apps for iOS and Android to use gmail,

and you see many users wishing they could get a desktop app for gmail instead of leaving it open in a browser tab.

I get it, you're used to build stuff with AIR/Flash, and yeah as long as there is a Flash plugin in the browser it is much more convenient to just publish a SWF.

But even in this scenario, the Flash player plugin running a SWF in the browser is much more limited than what Adobe AIR can do,

and those limitations are because of the browser.

And you know what, it has already been tried and every single times they have either failed, been abandoned or deprecated

see Some Thoughts on the HTML Target for AIR

Wallaby (Adobe), Swiffy (Google), Shumway (Mozilla), etc.

The latest and best bet so far to convert ActionScript 3 to JavaScript/HTML/CSS is Apache Royale

but as any tech it's not magic it will force you to make choices.