HTML5 and AJAX vs. Adobe Flash and Actionscript in respect to multimedia and video conferencing

Question

Please, I am conducting a personal research concerning web development programming languages. I am looking forward to get some information regarding HTML5 and Ajax compared to Adobe Flash. I am outlining my short questions below:

---

Question 1: Which is generally more stable and wisely used HTML5 and AJAX or Adobe Flash? or it depends on the type of website?

Question 2: For developing eye-candy websites that are used for video conferencing and other multimedia solutions, is Adobe Flash a good choice or some other options like HTML5 and AJAX or maybe PHP are more suitable in such a case?

Question 3: Is content management systems (CMS) with content management frameworks (CMF) suitable for developing online-based advanced video conferencing websites?

---

Generally speaking, I am looking more for facts rather than subjective answers.

Thanks in advance for your help and for sharing your knowledge!

Answer 1

Answer 1: Depends on the type of website. Disregarding ideological concerns, you will often want to use HTML if possible because it has several benefits in terms of usability et c, but some features that exist in Flash are simply not available in the standard web stack (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

Answer 2: If you want to do video conferencing, Flash is likely your only choice out of the two. HTML5 video does not support streaming, or at least not to the same extent that Flash does. However, this does not mean that the entire website/application needs to be built using Flash, just the videoconferencing part. Whether or not to build the rest in Flash as well basically comes down to:

1. Which technique will be easier/faster/cheaper to use?
2. Is the video conferencing such a big part of the experience that it remedies building the rest of the experience in Flash too, ignoring the benefits of HTML? The logic here being that if someone that cannot use Flash visits the website, there is no meaningful content for them there since the main feature (video conferencing) is inherently impossible.

Answer 3: If you need to manage content (e.g. articles, recorded video conferences et c) then yes, a CMS of some sort makes sense. If not, then not really. It's really a too general question to give a meaningful answer.

As a side-note, AJAX is a technique used in web development that comprises the sending and receiving of XML using asynchronous requests invoked by Javascript. It is a very specific technique (that granted, was a bit of a buzzword a couple of years ago) and is not something you need to employ even if you were to build the application using the HTML/CSS/Javascript stack.

PHP is a server-side technology, and is in no way a "competitor" to either Flash or HTML (which are front-end technologies) when designing a web application. You will likely need a dynamic back-end regardless of what technique you use on the front-end, and PHP is one programming language/platform that you can use to build that back-end. Others include Python/Django, Ruby On Rails, Microsoft ASP.NET and many, many more.