JD on EP

Caveat: These are my current personal observations -- one person's thoughts -- and are not the considered words of the group itself. Take 'em for what they're worth and no more, please.... ;-)

Why Flash "Platform"? Because it has gotten so darn big. Most talk on weblogs and mailing lists is about presentation design or application development, but what tends to be invisible in the larger discussions is the incredible popularity of Breeze, the way that Contribute is being used to bring about a true read/write web, the way that businesses RIAs are achieving both investment and deployment. Flash Platform is bigger than just Flash... it's a different thing than it was five years ago.

Flash Platform is at a funny scale. It's not at the hardware level -- device manufacturers do things Macromedia cannot do, and vice-versa. It's not at the operating system level, built atop hardware -- Microsoft, Apple and the various Linux leaders do things Macromedia cannot do, and vice-versa. It's not at the services level -- Yahoo, Google, and other server-centric audience owners do things Macromedia cannot do, and vice-versa. These levels can cooperate together, but they're fundamentally at different scales.

Macromedia Flash Platform can be seen as a services layer above the world's computers -- predictable interactivity, predictable media, predictable development costs above various hardware choices, various OS choices, various browser choices -- and supporting a great variety of possible social services layers above it.

What Flash Platform does is make the world's machines homogenous and predictable, and provide a variety of development workflows to take advantage of this predictable worldwide services layer. It respects the audience's choices, and makes it cheaper for development which respects the audience's diversity.

(When I type that, though, I can't help thinking of remaining challenges such as right-to-left scripts... it ain't perfect, but it's the closest I've seen.)

So... the scope of Flash Platform is huge, bigger than what we commonly discuss online. The implementation this cycle was not completely synched in time across all releases. The "creative professional" releases were ready for autumn release, and the "RIA development" releases will be coming up next year. Both sides were in development when the "Flash Platform" concept was introduced this past spring. I'm glad to have this all out in public view now.

Sidenote: The contribution of the Allaire groups to this whole "Flash Platform" is important, from what I've seen. In a networked environment it's vital to have appropriate development on both display and serving computers. ColdFusion users were the first to reduce the costs of serverside interactivity, and without their expertise and perspective I couldn't predict the shape of Remoting, Communication Servers, Flex Servers, Breeze and the other work of recent years. By 2005 most other technologists have come to agree on this whole "RIA" approach, but I don't know of any other approach that has integrated the client and server, as Allaire & Macromedia have been doing over the past five years.

There's another angle in today's announcements, too. Alpha bits will be publicly available this month. Private betas have usually handled from a few hundred to a few thousand participants... Players have gone through open developer betas for compatibility testing... a few projects like Central and Smart3D have had pre-beta public releases. But I've never seen the development process opened to general public inspection and comment so early in the cycle before.

Will this work? I can't usefully guess either way. The cost of accurate listening is massively underestimated in most discussions I read... filtering the raw feedback into actionable items is a hard task. And in every feedback cycle there are necessarily some requests which cannot be fulfilled -- every participant has valid needs for how they want the technology to grow, and I haven't seen a case yet where all these needs are always fulfilled. I'm hopeful, and think it's a great move, but it's also an experiment too.

And... there's one more angle to keep in mind when you're making your personal evaluations of where Flash Platform may go in the future. Adobe Systems and Macromedia Inc. are joining this year to make a new company, called Adobe Systems. More on that in another essay....

Anyway, for me, today's announcements flesh out the reasoning behind the "Flash Platform" announcements of last spring. The above are just my own words, not previewed by others here, and I'd defer to the group for a better overall perspective. Them's my two cents, though, and I hope they were worth your time in reading. ;-)