Support legacy Flex app file after 2020

[emanuelef48115730]

Hi,

as after 2020 browsers will stop supporting Flash player I'm investigating how it will be possible to support my swf app served from a web server.

Currently I can point the browser to the url with the swf and the app is working as expected.

To avoid depending on the browsers (after 2020) I've created a simple prototype in Flex where I load the remote swf using mx:HTML.

I then package the app in a captive runtime bundle and everything seems working, am I correct assuming that:

1. Even after 2020 the captive runtime bundle app will keep working, or there will be also limitations to use AIR in the Operating system ?
2. Is the mx:HTML tag using the AIR runtime to run the remote swf ? If I right click when running I see the same menu like when running the remote swf on the browser.
   I'm afraid that it still depends on Flash player installed on the system.

Thanks in advance

Emanuele

[IGZN]

Since AIR 22 Flash Player is no longer part of AIR desktop applications (Flash Player and AIR 22 Release Notes​ )

Starting in AIR 22, applications that play swf content via the HTML control (WebKit) will now load the system level NPAPI Flash Player provided by Adobe (https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer).  If this plugin is not available on the system, the end user will be prompted to download and install the plugin from Adobe.

This means that your assumption is correct, what you see when you right click on a SWF is actually the context menu of the Flash Player (plugin) of your default browser. Once this Flash plugin is removed globally from browsers, you'll no longer be able to display SWF files in mx:HTML or StageWebView.

But since you have access to the SWF and maybe the source, I recommend you to create a completely new desktop app from the source, or load the SWF with Loader class and add it to the display list, this way AIR will render the contents instead of the included browser. It's a much better and cleaner method anyway. Make sure you read about sandboxing rules first before loading remote content, but it should not be an issue since you'll target desktop apps.

[IGZN]

And to answer your other question: as of today it looks like Adobe will keep AIR alive, so all your apps will work well after 2020, we might even expect many more updates and versions of AIR by then.

[chaky]

Hi IGZN,

Why did you say "as of today it looks like Adobe will keep AIR alive"?

Is there something that changed with AIR today? Is there been any announcement from Adobe today?

[emanuelef48115730]

Thanks for answering, that helped me understanding more about Flash support.

One thing I noticed is that if I package the AIR app in a captive runtime bundle (tried on the Mac) I see that by showing the package content there's a Flash Player.plugin, isn't this the one used when distributing the AIR app as captive runtime bundle ?

In fact I can see that when I use Flash player on the browser is version 29, while when running the captive AIR app is version 11. (different behaviour than the original post but that's because I installed the latest Flash Player 29 on the browser).

This maybe happens because I'm using AIR 3.1 at the moment.

Considering that browsers will drop Flash player support, isn't it more convenient to avoid depending on browsers and OS environment ?

I tried to use the SWFLoader instead and I have another post on that:

Load remote swf and access to stage

In that case I wasn't able to load the remote swf, more on the post about that.

Bye