Adobe's World of Web/Desktop Integration
Read/WriteWeb's Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo!
I'm at a session at the Web 2.0 Summit called 'Breaking Free: Working with Real Time Data, Online, Offline, and Outside of the Browser'. The speaker is Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Technical Evangelist from Adobe. He starts off by saying that Adobe is looking for a "high definition user experience". He thinks the following things are still missing from the Web:
- Expressiveness
- Performance
- Rich Media - not just passive consumption like YouTube, but interactive
- Real Time - a rich flow of data between the server and the client
- Desktop/Offline - apps that run outside the browser
Adobe open sources Virtual Machine technology to Mozilla
He then talks about the Flash Player 9, which includes a virtual machine for ActionScript (like Java). In laymens terms, "virtual machine" refers to the software used to run applications.
Adobe announced this morning that they have donated this virtual machine to Mozilla, to work on as an open source project. Mozilla will use it within Firefox (by the first half of 2008) and Adobe will continue to use it in Flash Player 9. The name of the open source project is Tamarin and it will be governed and managed by developers from Adobe and Mozilla. News.com calls it "the largest code contribution yet to the open source Mozilla Foundation". As Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, told news.com: the move furthers the company's plan to allow developers to mix and match programming technologies, including AJAX-style Web development and Flash for media and animation.
While I'm no expert in Adobe products yet, I have learned this year that they're promoting a mix of Ajax and Flash technologies for web-based apps - rather than demanding that Flash is best for all interactivity on the Web. Widgets is one area where there is a lot of promise in Flash, because they are mini apps where interactivity is a primary concern.
John Dowdell has an excellent list of links and quotes if you want to follow up on this news, including this great soundbite from Slashdot: "AJAX in Flash, with a Web 2.0 hype engine. May god have mercy on us all."
Apollo Project
Christophe talks about how Apollo will be able to play and render different types of content - e.g. Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax. What this means is that you can take HTML content offline. I'll be finding out more about Apollo during the conference.
This workshop I'm sitting in on currently is a bit developer-focused for my high level brain to process, so I'll follow up with another post later when I've gotten more details of Apollo.
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Come by the Adobe booth at the Pavilion. I'll show you the Apollo bit. It is quite cool IMO. Cheers!
Thanks for letting us be your Web 2.0 sponsor. Hope the conference is all that and more.
Nicki Dugan
Editor, Yodel Anecdotal
I don't think that Tamarin does much for allowing Flash and Ajax to interoperate although it might make ActionScript and JavaScript a bit more compatible down the line. I gather the main benefit is improved JavaScript performance for Firefox and other Mozilla-based apps.
Apollo is super-cool, however, it's going in a proprietary direction and I'm not sure that the right way to integrate Flash and Ajax is through a proprietary player.
Have fun at the summit! I always enjoy your coverage and am looking forward to hearing more about what goes on there.
I was very excited to hear Adobe had open sourced ActionScript.