Apple develops Gianduia - an alternative to Flash

As you remember, last week Steve Jobs posted a letter about his thoughts on Flash and that same day Adobe’s CEO commented on it.  Sometime later chief technology officer Kevin Lynch also expressed his opinion on the situation:

"It's not about HTML5 vs. Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the Web."

In the meantime, Instead of using plugin-based technologies like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, Apple created a new client-side framework Gianduia to produce quality online applications for retail users.

Gianduia was introduced at World of WebObjects Developer Conference last summer, and more information will be probably revealed at this year's WWDC and WOWODC events. Framework was named after Italian hazelnut chocolate. One of the Mac developers Jonathan Rezntzsch (a.k.a. "Wolf") described Gianduia as "browser-side Cocoa (including CoreData) + WebObjects, written in JavaScript by non-js-haters".

Gianduia took a Java-inspired name (like Cocoa and Capuccino) because of similarity of the methods to create rich online applications that Cocoa developers usually use. While HTML5 has its new Rich Internet App features to compete with Adobe Flash, SproutCore, Gianduia and other related frameworks show that web applications may be created using existing web standards (and with no need of installing web plugins).

Gianduia has been already used by Apple in such programs as iPhone reservation system, One-to-One program and Consierge service for Personal Shopping and Genius Bar reservations.

With the appearance of Gianduia Adobe Flash will continue to lose its positions in every aspect of its usability. Wrapped in Flash H.263/Sorenson Spark codec had been replaced by H.264 so that Flash-free devices could play videos from Youtube, Brightcove, Vimeo, CBS, ABS, OOyala. In animation and interactivity Flash has a rival named Canvas, which is another HTML5 element. It creates graphics as a part of the web page's DOM (Document Object Model) so it could be manipulated by CSS-code.

To have a better performance Flash should be constantly improved by Adobe, while Javascript performance is being enhanced and optimized by browser vendors with every new version of their products. Moreover, the proprietary Adobe platform has far more security issues than its open source rival.

That explains why more and more companies refuse from using Flash. For example, this Thursday Scribd, which is a Document sharing service, changed its interface to HTML5:

“We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a web page.”

With Gianduia it becomes obvious why Apple's policy versus Flash becomes more and more tough.