Everyone seems to be touting HTML5 video as the “open” alternative to the proprietary Flash plugin required for .flv playback in the browser. But how open is H.264, the codec that powers HTML5 video, and the current pick for encoding video for online delivery? Using H.264 as the codec behind HTML5 video sours things a bit for me. H.264 is encumbered by software patents; to develop or distribute a player or encoder for H.264 you might have to pay a licensing fee to MPEG-LA. Even though MPEG LA announced last week (PDF) that H.264 will remain fee-less for free internet video through 2016, this is not the same as being free or open. MPEG-LA can still go after people that produce the software to encode or decode H.264. And MPEG-LA is not just one organization, it’s a collection of patent holders that have their own agendas.

All this is a bit of a slap in the face to the open standards that power the web. Imagine if you had to pay a half million dollars to create or display JPEGs, GIFs, or HTML… The only people that would be able to afford to make software for the web would be huge companies. But what are our alternatives? Beyond Ogg Theora and Matroska, the pickings are slim. These codecs are open and free, but not necessarily better than H.264. Plus it would be next to impossible to compete with the marketing machine of Apple behind H.264.

Open and free standards have been what has made the Internet successful since its inception. I think it’s important that users understand this so that the Internet of the future cannot be controlled by corporations with enough cash to cover licensing fees.

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To me, this isn’t so much a debate about Flash/ActionScript 3 versus HTML5, but rather another win for HTML + Flash/AS3! It’s all about creativity as a developer. Bad coding leads to poor applications, proper coding leads to a proper experience. It is a common pitfall that most people think “HTML or Flash”. I see this as more power for the mixing of technologies, raising the cap on what can and can’t be done in a web browser.

Adobe’s technologies provide clear benefits to the end user, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the developer. As a developer, I can utilize the unique capabilities of the .flv format to protect content in some fashion or for metadata injection, all of which can be done on the fly and server-side, if implemented using Flash Media Server (FMS).  I’m also really excited about Flash Player 10.1 – it brings the ability to scale all the way from mobile to HD flavors, and will be available on smartphones and other Internet-connected mobile devices.

This is about more than just video delivery, it is the platform combined with the tools, and Adobe has been making tremendous strides in going open-source with them. Adobe is providing a cohesive environment that is deeply integrated with some of the best tools out there for content creation. HTML5 is just starting out, and the gap between the tools and technology is too immense to make it the competition. Flash has fantastic penetration and Adobe can rapidly evolve the technology. Remember, HTML5 still is not a standard – in fact we are looking at sometime in 2012 before we’ll see a final recommendation. These are cohesive technologies and they are here to stay for a very long time, which means plugins will be around for a long time too. Simply put,  plugin implementations have the potential to penetrate faster, and as history has shown they often do. Plugins forge the path, and the Web comes right behind them to standardize those paths.

If you want to better understand what the big picture is regarding Adobe and its technologies, I recommend reading a little bit about:

OpenScreenProject
Catalyst
SVG and FXG
Flex Data Services
RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
Binary Sockets

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A Little Background: Zend?, Zend Server?, Flex?
Zend is known as “The PHP Company”. Their founders are key contributors to the core PHP language and the company focuses on creating products to help improve the entire PHP application development life-cycle experience. They provide products and services to help with configuration and installation, development, deployment and with production application administration and maintenance.

Zend Server dashboard

Zend Server is one of Zend’s most recent products and is a package of several different Zend offerings. On one hand, Zend Server is a certified PHP distribution that includes the most reliable and up-to-date version of PHP, tested PHP extensions, database drivers and comes bundled with Apache. It also wraps a nice, user-friendly interface around the configuration management of PHP, Apache and all these extensions to provide ease of initial environment configuration and maintenance. On the other hand, it is a suite of development components providing tools to ease development and deployment, optimize application performance by speeding up PHP execution and by providing data caching options, and assist in monitoring and debugging multiple environments running remotely. Zend Server comes in two flavors: A free community version and a commercial version. The commercial version has extra features as well as full support from Zend.

Flex is an Adobe development framework that assists in the creation of cross-platform rich internet Flash applications (RIAs). Flex has really opened-up the Flash door to non-Flash developers. It removes the need to work within the esoteric Flash movie “timeline” and allows traditional programmers a more familiar environment in which to build applications. You use the ActionScript scripting language and an XML-based markup language called MXML to build Flex applications.

Adobe Flex Builder 3

Okay, so what does one have to do with the other?
Well, as developers are turning to Flex as a presentation tier to help meet the ever growing demands of Web applications to manage and deliver rich media and deliver rich interactive user experiences, they have to turn somewhere for the application tier to deliver the services and data management that drive these flashy front-ends. To date, Java has been by far the most popular choice for this tier. So much so, that some claim there are no other “real” options. I would never argue against a decision to use Java as the application tier in an n-tier Web application environment. But I do think there are options. And I do believe PHP is one of those options.

Among many professional software developers, PHP has a reputation for not being particularly well-suited to large or extremely complex site implementations. Some even believe that PHP is nothing but a simple templating language, only to be used for initial mockups and quick demonstration POCs, and has no role in serious, production, “Enterprise” applications. I don’t want to go down the long path of refuting such misconceptions. Please take a look at Zend’s own John Coggeshall’s rebuttal of such claims. But one fair criticism of PHP, also acknowledged in Mr. Coggeshall’s article, is that PHP has been weak in “Enterprise” tooling. Java has been in this space for a while, and has several free and commercial application servers from which to choose that provide a wealth of tools and functionality to support serious, enterprise-grade applications. Zend Server is striving to fill this gap in PHP and move PHP onto the short-list of viable options when CTOs, CIOs and Managers are choosing the technology stack on which to run their next next big RIA project.

One last point, with regard to Abode Flex in particular, is that previously there has been no official supported implementation of Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) integration with PHP. The teaming of Adobe and Zend to back Zend_Amf, which is part of the Zend Framework bundled with Zend Server, has changed this fact. With the release of Zend_Amf, PHP can now officially speak in the native tongue of Flex’s ActionScript, making integration fast and seamless. This, along with the introduction of Zend Server, goes a long way in support of using PHP as the application server tier behind an Adobe Flex UI.

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