I'm excited. Not because a technology is dying, necessarily, but because something far, far better has risen in it's place. Because now I, as a developer, can use a language (no, ActionScript is not a language, at least in my book) that works for rapid development, that leverages my existing knowledge of CSS, and that users won't have to use a plugin for.

Flash is dead, long live jQuery.

I've recently been playing around on a few pseudo-projects, where I've just done as much "flashy" stuff as I can (Maybe I'll update these later if I ever have anything finished.) So far, I've had things fade in, things move, things flash, things animate to different colors, things change when they're focused on, or moused over, or clicked on... almost everything anyone used flash for in the past, I've been able to replicate. The only thing I haven't tried so far is embedding multimedia (I have used a sound plugin that works beautifully, though.) And all of this with a few lines of code, no compiling.. and only a 19kb download.

Almost everything I've ever wanted to do with jQuery already exists in a plugin. Everything else was either a tweak of another plugin, or something I built myself, and always under 20 lines of code. Make that happen with Actionscript.

I guess what I'm saying is: jQuery is easier for the developer to develop, and it's easier for the client computer to run (no plugins, faster, direct dom manipulation). So, why is anyone still using Flash?