Date: Feb. 5, 2001
Link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2001/02/02/epstein.html
Source Author or Organization: Dale Dougherty, O'Reilly Network

This interview with O'Reilly editor and author Bruce Epstein examines the reasons many web developers are viewing Macromedia Flash as a significant technology. The tool is approaching ubiquity as an available vector graphics platform; it comes with the current Internet Explorer, Netscape and AOL browsers, and a December 2000 study by NPD Online (the founder of MediaMetrix) says Flash is now viewable by 96.4% of Web users. The Flash format (SWF) has been opened, and is now written and edited by many third party tools.

Flash supports XML and Extensible Markup Language Remote Procedure Calls (XML-RPC), and Macromedia and Allaire (who have merged) recently announced a toolkit named Harpoon that allows ColdFusion and JRun developers to use Flash as a front end. Flash's "substantially beefier" programming language, ActionScript, is based on the ECMA standard and has a Javascript-like syntax.

Epstein predicts cross-pollination between Flash developers and Perl/Python/PHP developers in the near future.