This week at ECM West, Adobe’s Tom Malloy, Senior Vice President and Chief Software Architect of Advanced Technology Labs, gave a General Session speech with demonstrations about Adobe’s view of the next generation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). As you might expect, Adobe’s vision consists of the marriage of Adobe’s proprietary, but universally used, PDF and Flash technologies.
Adobe has made a fairly compelling story. Flash technology became part of the Adobe technology product family after the acquisition of MacroMedia by Adobe last year. Over the years, Flash has become pervasive on the Internet and become the preferred delivery format for animation and video. Adoption of the technology by sites like YouTube have secured the dominance of the Flash technology.
Likewise, Adobe’s companion and home-grown technology, PDF, rivals Microsoft WORD as the most common file format for storing and transmitting documents, and PDF has the advantage of being truly platform independent. Although the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine is a bit bloated, it’s fidelity of page rendering is unsurpassed.
The Adobe plan is to meld HTML + Flash + PDF into light-weight visually-rich and responsive web-based applications. But the RIAs can also be delivered and treated as documents. Send them by email or download them from the net, but the content can be document-like internet-aware highly-interactive documents.
The Adobe demonstration gave examples from the mortgage industry that showed how graphics, text and forms processing could be merged and populated with back-end data from the internet, creating highly interactive next-generation ‘documents’. The definition of application and document begin to blur.
Adobe’s goal is to turn out developer and content creator tools that will help them recruit application creators for building Web 2.0-style applications. One example is FLEX-2, Adobe’s IDE and environment for building RIA browser-based internet applications.
Initial reviews of Flex have been good, but deployment costs can become expensive ($20,000 per CPU plus maintenance and services). The costs and proprietary nature of the Adobe technology have led some to seek out lower cost alternatives, like OpenLaszlo.
But Adobe is trying to reverse the image of being a closed technology company. On the same day of Malloy’s talk, Adobe announced that the Adobe VM was to be embedded in the next version of Mozilla. Adobe has contributed the source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine and its Just in Time compiler to the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. This is code that was acquired by Adobe in the purchase of MacroMedia.
Mozilla has created a new project for the Adobe VM called the Tamarin Project, named after a species of tiny arboreal monkeys. Adobe developers will continue to work on and contribute to the project. But without parallel support in Microsoft’s IE, it isn’t clear how useful it will be.
