Flash vs Qt: The next battle? « Felipe Andrade

14Oct/099

Flash vs Qt: The next battle?

Both Qt and Flash platform have something in common: a cross-platform runtime environment.

IMHO, Qt could be a Flash killer in the near future.

Adobe introduced Adobe AIR on March, 2007, to provide a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application and maybe mobile.

While Adobe AIR developers can benefit of using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax skills to build applications that deploy to the desktop, Qt developers benefits from a successful open source framework, with high performance on embedded, mobile and desktop.

There are some rumors of Adobe Air to mobile phones that could bring ActionScript 3.0, the current robust OOP programming language of Flash to mobile phones but the question is: Will Adobe be able to deliver AIR runtime to mobile phones with the same performance achieved by the trolls?

...and...

Will trolls be able to maintain Qt flexible and scalable with so many deliveries (Maemo, Symbian, Windows, ...)?

It's my point of view, please, comment if you have any ideas or feedback about this.

Filed under: AIR, AIR Mobile, Adobe, Flash, Flash Lite Nokia, Flex, Flex Mobile, Forum Nokia, Forum Nokia Blogs, Forum Nokia Champion, Internet Geral, Maemo, N900, Nokia, Ovi Store, Qt Software, Qt for S60, S40, S60, Symbian, WRT, i2 tecnologia Leave a comment

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Comments (9) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Mark Doherty
October 14th, 2009 - 20:08

Hi Felipe,

I think it’s fair to say that Qt is a great platform for cross-platform development. In fact our Photoshop Elements product is built on it

We’ve already completed our first step towards bringing AIR to devices with the launch of Flash Player 10.1. The first platform that we’re working on for AIR is Android, and hopefully we’ll see a beta next year.

While Qt is a very fast platform there is always the larger issue of development workflow. Qt is largely C++ based and this won’t make it accessible for designers and user experience efforts. Of course the XML component framework will help, but as ever this won’t solve all problems.

Adobe AIR has seen over 200million downloads now and while I think Qt is a great move for Symbian generally, I do fear that it’s too little and too late.

Mark

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Marcel Caraciolo
October 15th, 2009 - 02:18

I believe that Qt is a powerful platform, even if its essence is to be cross-platform. But on another way, Adobe with Flash platform is growing specially through other platforms than “Nokia” phones. It will be interesting to see both platforms challenging for space at mobile phones.
I think Qt will be relevant, but Adobe with its goal to cross all mobile platforms (Samsung, LG, Android, etc…) has a great advantage at Qt platform.

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Marcel Caraciolo
October 15th, 2009 - 02:18

I believe that Qt is a powerful platform, even if its essence is to be cross-platform. But on another way, Adobe with Flash platform is growing specially through other platforms than “Nokia” phones. It will be interesting to see both platforms challenging for space at mobile phones.
I think Qt will be relevant, but Adobe with its goal to cross all mobile platforms (Samsung, LG, Android, etc…) has a great advantage at Qt platform.

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iongion
October 16th, 2009 - 18:42

QT GUI has faaaar better performance than anything in flash(the exception which might testify the rule could be video)

The only drawback … the programming language.

YES, c++ programmers are way better programmers than actionscript programmers (unless actionscript programmers come with c++/java/c# background) but their spread is like pluto and the entire solar system …

QT must push a scripting language for casual hackers, not everyone is Ray Tobay (Python might be good choice, but who would pay so much for pyqt when flexsdk/flashdevelop is so free)

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Winchell Chung
October 16th, 2009 - 19:05

Nokia is working on a LGPL version of PyQt called PySide.

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Dimitris
October 17th, 2009 - 12:50

“QT must push a scripting language”

Actually it already supports the most common one… JavaScript!

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Felipe Andrade
October 19th, 2009 - 12:57

Hi Mark, I could consider using Adobe AIR on Android if Adobe team up with Google engineers to provide a Flash player version without so many restrictions and performance faults like occurs in Symbian.

Just look for the Flash platform on Maemo. Why it does not matter for Adobe?
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=31120

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Mark Doherty
December 4th, 2009 - 11:36

Hi Felipe,

I think it's fair to say that there will always be issues when it comes to mobile device performance. This is not something that we can control, but the goal with the Open Screen Project is to fix the other issues. FP10.1 should meet your needs, and if not then shout about it!

Maemo is a great platform and we obviously support them in porting desktop Flash 9, in fact they were the only device to ever ship apart from the PS3. At MAX you probably saw that we showed the N900 running Flash 10.1, which was by far the best demo in the keynote.

We're not just focussed on Android, our goal is to cover all platforms, even the iPhone!

Mark

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- felipebzr
  December 6th, 2009 - 14:25
  
  Hi Mark, what I really do not understand is why Android was selected to be the first device to support Adobe AIR. Marketing strategy? Maemo really rocks!
  
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