By Charles Iliya Krempeaux

Too often Flash is surrounded with much hype and buzzwords. People often only have a very fuzzy idea of what Flash really is. Often it is difficult for a software engineer to get to the core of what is Flash. This document pushes past all “market speak” and “fluff” and describes Flash for what it really is.

The word Flash is used to name a handful of very different things. (Each of the things listed below, often called “Flash”.)

There is the SWF data format. When you make a Flash file, you are making this. When you #### TODO ####. And SWF file is the finished product. It is what your web browser downloads, when you embed Flash in a web page.

There is the Flash Player. This #### TODO ####

There is Macromedia’s Flash IDE. This is a very popular tool used by artists and designers to create SWF files. #### TODO ####

All of these things are actually called Flash which can lead to confusion among software engineers (and even the designers and artists that have been using Flash for years).

TODO

The word streaming is misused alot. Things that should be called progressive downloading are often called streaming. This section of this document will try to get rid of all confusion.

TODO

TODO

TODO

• AS
• AMF
• Flash Video (FLV)
• SWF
• TODO

Other data formats that are not Flash specific, but are also used are:

• MP3
• PNG
• XML
• TODO

TODO

The are a variety of protocols which a Flash Player will allow a Flash application to communicate with. (And even with this protocols, there are limitations. #### TODO #### example the limitations.) These protocols are:

• HTTP
• HTTPS
• RTMP
• RTMPT

TODO

TODO