Maybe this is not so obvious in this website, but one of the most important aspects in my defense of the Fnk project during my final college presentation was how we’re moving to web-based applications to many of the common tasks we’d only usually find in expensive standalone programs, so it’s refreshing to see I’m not the only one who think there’s a silent revolution forming up. That’s not to say I believe we’ll completely replace standalone applications with web-based ones, but I can see a large number of web apps taking over.

Ironically, to me, this is a full change of mind from how I saw things around 4 years ago; I used to laugh at the idea of someone editing text documents online, but my own college experience has made me open my eyes. That’s because during college, I normally needed to do some tasks like edit documents or spreadsheets from different computers – from different operating systems – just about all the damn time, and almost never using the same computer. Remoting to my home computer (through VNC) was a problem due to firewalls and lack of speed; portable, thumb drive-based applications were too slow (and I needed both OSX and Windows versions of those). But when I started using applications like Google Docs, things just snapped into place. It just clicked, and I started using Google Docs every day for college-related stuff.

I certainly don’t think this is a solution for everyone, but for some, web applications is just perfect, and this is also something I hope to defend with Fnk.

While Fnk doesn’t yet support PB filters – right now its image filtering capabilities are restricted to the lone Blur filter node – it’ll do so in the near future (it has always been part of the plan since Fnk was born), and this is a great opportunity to learn the platform. HLSL/GLSL pixel shader programmers will already feel right at home, and will also be contributing to something that can be used by a majority of people later (in After Effects, Photoshop and many others), not just by programmers in some OpenGL or DirectX environment.

The Fnk project, since the beginning, was targetting Flash Player 10, as many of its new features were already known in advance and they would play a big part in the project. I’m building Fnk’s current test versions targetting Flash Player 9, though, since it’s what we have available; near the end of the year, however, as the project comes to the end of its Alpha phase, Flash Player 10 is the one I’ll be using. It probably won’t happen until I’m building some of the most advanced nodes, though.

Edit: I did not expect this, but Adobe has made updated versions of the Flex compiler and libraries available, so it is possible to create Flash Player 10 content publicly. Perfect; henceforth, Fnk will be compiled against Flash 10 only and will require this version for execution.

At first glance, this is a node-based programming environment with a lot of similarities to what I’m trying to do with Fnk. But instead of going with the simpler, more experimental side as I’m trying with Fnk, it has its own twists – like the ability to easily import any class and to write and compile code on the fly, as well as export the result – which definitely take this to another level.

Update: And because it’s so easy, people have actually ported the Processing IDE itself. There’s a XUL version of the IDE (to run it on Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox), and there’s a nifty editor here that’s more web-friendly (although the text editing itself is acting like crazy on my Firefox 3 Beta 5, so be warned).

Both those links come from this page, which has some interesting discussion about the topic. Although I somewhat disagrees with the author’s vision on Flash – I don’t think it’s a “market niche” that a canvas-drawing framework will replace; this to me is as incorrect as the comparison people usually draw between SVG and Flash – I do agree that there’s some hidden value indeed in running (most of) Processing within JavaScript. Let’s see what other nice things come out of it now.

Additionally, based on my script tests, Canvas drawing performance on Processing for JavaScript seems to be on par with actual Processing for Java performance, at least in regards to some repetitive 2d shape drawing. I can’t wait to see what happens when Tamarin is actually used in the next version of Firefox and ends up making it even faster.

As an additional reference, there’s also a video of last year’s MAX event at Chicago which shows a first sneak-peek at what the player will be capable of.

Other than requests for better sound manipulation, the website also has a blog as well as a nifty list of Audio projects that use Flash as its main platform, and is well worth a visit.