No, Apple’s nascent Gianduia platform will not kill Flash for the masses. That is what HTML5 is for – at least according to Steve Jobs.
Indeed, as Jobs recently opined, the “avalanche” of media outlets offering content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is “no longer necessary” to watch video or consume web content.
“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices and PCs too,” Jobs claimed in an open letter written in April.
Nevertheless, the Internet has been all a-Twitter about Apple supposedly developing an indigenous replacement for Flash.
However, as PC Mag’s David Murphy points out, all the current speculation and brouhaha is based on a single Twitter message uttered by Apple developer Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch.
“The tweet, nearly a year old, describes Apple’s Gianduia framework—a Web-based mishmash of Javascript, HTML5, and CSS that, essentially is browser-side Cocoa (including CoreData) + WebObjects, written in JavaScript by non-js-haters,” explained Murphy.
“The framework, debuted a year ago at Apple’s World of WebObjects Developer Conference, wasn’t perceived as a Flash-killer at the time of its arrival.”
So what does Apple use Gianduia for?
Well, AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger writes that Apple has deployed the platform to create web apps for a number of programs, including One-to-One, iPhone reservation system, Concierge service and Personal Shopping.
“Like Cappuccino, Gianduia takes a Cocoa-inspired name (Cocoa is itself a Java-inspired name) to describe its role as a way for Cocoa developers to bring their skills to rich online applications built using web standards, with no need for a proprietary web plugin like Flash or Silverlight.
“While the emerging new support for Rich Internet App features in HTML5 is often pitted competitively against Flash, Gianduia, SproutCore and related frameworks demonstrate that sophisticated web apps are already possible using existing web standards and without web plugins.”
Still, as as Murphy notes, Gianduia isn’t a downloadable tool that allows developers to construct Flash-style content such as animations or games.
“[Yes], Gianduia [enables] one to write Web apps in a kind of Objective-C environment to recreate OSX-, iPhone-, or iPad-like interfaces within a Web browser. [But] it’s a framework, not a Flash-killer—at least, not now.”
