Re: Adobe's RIA Technologies

Great observations Nathan. I think we will see some changes in development strategy in the next year or so as more web applications become client based and "richer". Seems like the industry yo-yo's between a push to move things to the client and then back to the server. Technologies like Flash, although cool in itself, still forces more of the computing resources over to the client. Flash has had it's own set of security exploits and every technology that requires more client side "plug-ins" or application installation seems to open yet another door to malicious code.

The classic issue in emerging technologies like RIA is trying to understand how well they will scale and how secure they will be, even before the industry has had much experience. The danger is that you will find scaling issues or security management problems just when your development begins to take off. Best practices need to be established, benchmarks reviewed, and so on. Embracing the latest technology can have some interesting downsides.

As far as the application integration issues are concerned, I haven't had enough experience with Flash apps to know if navigational structure is dictated by the technology or if it is a reflection of the style of this company we no longer work for which was to implement a technology long before they had a full grasp of how the implementation should best be carried out. The "Ready, Shoot, Aim" approach...

Pete


Nathan Andelin wrote:

> From: Pete Helgren

BTW Nathan, the latest iteration in the company you are referring to
is to use Adobe's RIA technologies (Flex and AIR I think) to develop
web applications.

Yes, I'm aware of that. "Rich Internet Applications", or RIA (for short) seems to be replacing "Open Source" as their new marketing mantra. In this case their newest applications run under Adobe Flash. And since we helped start the company and continue to hold stock, it's interesting to follow its strategy.

One pattern that seems to be common with Flash based applications is the embedding of navigational links or menu systems within the applications themselves, in contrast with the notion of accessing multiple applications from a shared menu system or running within a portal. I see that pattern in their newest RIA applications, and it puzzles me because we put so much work and emphasis into a unifying "application execution environment" or AEE, from the beginning. It's as if they abandoned the notion of running within a portal. But I wonder why? Does it have something to do with Adobe Flex or Flash runtimes? Is it just easier to open and manage multiple windows under Flash?

I subscribe to an email service for most Midrange lists, using http://www.gowebtop.com that runs under Flash, but during the past two weeks the site has been down more than up. I also get the "Virtual Memory too low..." message under Windows if I run a number of Flash based applications or videos during the day. Is Flash a viable runtime if you want to deploy hundreds of applications?

Nathan.