Adobe is trying to push Flash as a competitor for Ajax. Both these technologies have been the favorites in the Web 2.0 world. Adobe is open sourcing BlazeDS, a messaging technology that will help a Flex or AIR developer to communicate with the back-end distributed data.
Welcome to the BlazeDS beta release on Adobe Labs. BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.
BlazeDS was earlier available as a part of the commercial Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES. It will now be released under LGPL v3.
This capability will now encourage more developers to adopt Flex for developing RIAs. In fact, this will bring Flash closer to Ajax in terms of available infrastructure. I think this will also boost adoption of AIR on desktop.
Unfortunately, today none of the discussions involving Flash and Ajax can complete without mentioning accessibility. I believe Flash can be made accessible, just as Ajax can be made to degrade gracefully. But building it is not as easy, or in other words many developers feel that the cost benefit analysis goes against it. Whatever the reasons, Flash is still not in the good books of those of us who want to make all public Web content accessible. Though I believe that technically they are excellent software development tools.
Though Adobe should be applauded for trying to open source the entire stack, there is a missing link, and a critical one it is. The Flash player and the plugin are still proprietary, and they are necessary for Flash to work in a browser. Also, Adobe has ignored Linux for supporting both Flash and AIR earlier. Open sourcing them can get community contributions to make them available on Linux. I hope Adobe soon brings the open source goodness here as well.
December 13th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
I’m not sure I’d agree that Flash is trying to compete with Ajax. Although both work in the interface, one is browser-based and the other is proprietary through a plugin.
I would argue that there’s an entirely new technology that’s erupting and that’s Rapid Interface development. Flex/AIR are definitely major players in that market and, with its inherent Web Service and XML integration capabilities, they a strong contender for owning the User Interface - both online (FLEX) and offline (AIR), over any technology. That they made BladeDS for Java remoting is a great move. There’s already PHP and .NET remoting out there already.
Flash, at it’s root, is still just the multimedia component of Adobe. The ActiveX component loaded in browsers that run Flash and Flex (and can run through an external executable for AIR) is just that - a plugin to run either of these technologies.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Doug, I agree with you that Flash might not be trying to compete with Ajax. As you said they integrate differently with the browsers, but conceptually they can do the same thing. And with BlazeDS more easily available developers can think about, in some cases, using Flex where they are using Ajax. BlazeDS also supports a persistent connection, something like Comet. And I believe that they will start getting closer as we move ahead.