Can someone explain the difference between Adobe Flex and HTML5.
The big question. Adobe Flex is an SDK (Software Development Kit) that includes a user interface, a command line compiler, and other tools. The output of the Adobe Flex application is either a SWF file that runs in a browser based on Flash Player, or an AIR file that works with the Adobe runtime.
Flex is part of the Adobe Flash platform. I am going to quote myself to explain what the Flash Platform is:
The Flash platform consists of several deployment periods, development tools, and frameworks that are integrated into the full Adobe Creative Suite. The following is a list of some elements of the Flash Platform:
- Flash Player: Flash Player is a browser plugin that allows us to deploy web applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and Blackberry.
- Adobe AIR: Adobe AIR is a runtime environment that allows us to deploy native applications for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Blackberry.
- Flash Professional: Flash Professional is a timeline-based animation design tool.
- Flash Builder: Flash Builder is an IDE to help a programmer write advanced code.
- Adobe Flex: Flex is a software development kit that helps programmers create, debug, and deploy enterprise applications with the Flash Platform. Flex includes a library of user interface components, a SWF compiler, a command line debugger, and an application profiler.
There are more aspects of the Flash Platform ecosystem, but I highlight them because they come from Adobe and are prominent by the Flash Platform developers.
HTML5 is the specification for the next version of HTML. HTML is a markup language for creating web pages. It includes some new aspects of working with video (Video Tag) and for creating animations (Canvas).
HTML5, alone, is not a good choice for building applications.
However, when most people talk about HTML5, they also comment on JavaScript - the language used primarily to modify the Document Object Model web browser - and CSS3, which provides enhanced style support for HTML5 elements. HTML5, combined with JavaScript and CSS3, can be a good choice for creating a user interface for a browser-based mobile web application. HTML5 support on mobile devices is very consistent because the major mobile OS (Android and iOS) use the same rendering engine (WebKit) in their respective browsers.
There are more web rendering mechanisms on the desktop, and many people have older versions of the browser. Creating a desktop application with HTML5 technology is not a solution that I would take lightly, but it depends primarily on your audience.