During last week’s town hall, Jobs also took a swipe at Adobe Flash – still absent from the iPhone and apparently absent from the iPad as well. “They are lazy,” Jobs allegedly said of Adobe. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it…Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy…

“Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash…The world is moving to HTML5.”

This was taken from an article at theregister.

I have to say though, the guy has a point. I have been working with Flex now for a couple of years and we have found A LOT of bugs and errors with the platform and are always having to find a work-around. I started imagining the situation when Adobe thought up Flex. I just imagine this meeting where everyone is sitting around this big table scratching their heads about what to do next. “Why don’t we create a ‘framework’ that let’s people do these new RIA thingy majingies. We can just build it right on-top of flash with hardly no work at all”. That explains why its near on impossible to create real powerful applications. It turns out that Silverlight was actually thought about properly and designed and implemented from the bottom up correctly. I really wish that Adobe would sort out a lot of the problems it has with Flash. I mean we’re at version 3 of Flex now and its still buggy. Version 4 is about to come out soon so we will have to see if it gets any better. I doubt it will though for the security model (where most of my issues lie) as this is within the flash engine itself. We all know that Flash has had some (and most likely still does) incredibly shit security holes. It seems to me that they have just patched it up non-stop to fix the issue at hand. Some things we have tried to do are just impossible and I have found that the security model contradicts itself in many places.

I would like to end it on a positive note though. There are a lot of things that I do like about Flex and Flash or else I would never use it at all. I just wish that the player itself would have a complete rewrite going forward with perhaps a compatibility mode so the older stuff still works.

UPDATE.

As we suggested recently, the myriad bugs that over the past few years have routinely imperiled the entire internet have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry. Company security personnel seem intent of correcting the problems, but the only way for that to happen is to launch a comprehensive initiative that makes a top-to-bottom review of the company’s entire code base.

It would seem that things are just getting worse for Adobe and other people are also suggesting that Adobe revamp their whole product security.

It seems this has been making its way around the web and I thought it was funny so thought I would share it myself.

A few days ago facebook released (under opensource) their HipHop for PHP source code transformer. I remember first reading about this from an interview with a facebook employee on reddit. She mentioned that one guy was pretty much rewriting PHP to work on C++, which at the time sounded like they were working on some compiler. The actual product though is different, they basically convert the PHP source into C++ code, and then you can use your compiler of choice (probably g++) to get it up and running. I know something about this area as my final year project at uni I created a code transformer that would take a web script in PHP -> JSP -> ASP and convert it into any of the others. You could basically go in any direction – plus you could add in new modules for other languages that would allow you to transfer between even more. This was far from completion (I had it working for about 50% of common functionality) but I proved that it could be done – I also showed that you could optimize the code quite significantly. I basically added rules that would find common coding patterns and transform these in the AST (abstract syntax tree). Transforming to the new language was relatively easy as the tree was already in a good shape and the transformer knew how to properly express the tree in the most optimized way. The way I see it – HipHop has the opportunity to not only transform but optimize the hell out of the code as well. They say that in practice they are seeing a 50% CPU decrease and much better memory overhead.

I believe that the current version is compatible with PHP5.1 and they are quickly looking to get it compatible with 5.2. There are also some bits that it wont do, such as the rarely used eval() statement and function exists checking – these are things that they cant link to as they don’t know they exist, therefore can’t compile against

I have always liked PHP and have watched it get better and better to the point of it being a very professional tool in the right hands. I still regularly use PHP for my own applications that I need to get out the door quickly and effciently. What makes this interesting to me is that I can also look at it as a tool of choice for applications where I wouldn’t have before used PHP. I will have to play with it a bit and see what it can do. I think it will get more interesting when they get a version that can run on Apache/lighttd etc.

Go and get the code for yourself and check out the video for further information.

For more information on the technical challenges they face scaling Facebook, take a look at this article which goes into a deep enough description.