What is macromedia Flash^{® ®}

What is shockwave and flash?
Macromedia Flash enables the integration of video, text, audio and graphics.

Flash is a developer platform (program) to create flash films.
The working file of a flash film is the FLA format. This FLA films can be exported to the SWF format. SWF films can be seen with the Flashplayer.
Die Macromedia Inc. (http://www.macromedia.com/) has released the Flash format in 1998 as the Flash Open File Format to effuse Flash films through the Internet. Macromedia has not opened up the internal structure of the Flash file, but the structure of the Flash Player films.
Because of Macromedias incomplete information about Flash, a community was found to work out the missing specifications.
http://www.openswf.org/spec.html

Shockwave is the name for Macromedia's Multimedia Player (also known as SWF- or DCR-file) .
They are able to display grafics, animations. Even Sound (also used for CD-ROM production) can be transfer through the Internet with a very low amount of data.
Shockwave player files are produced with Macromedia Flash or Macromedia Director.