Re: Adobe's RIA Technologies

From: john e
The first RIA platform is JavaSE from Sun ...

It's interesting that you came to that conclusion. I was doing more research on Adobe's web site last night, trying to answer the questions I posed in earlier emails, and began seeing the many similarities between Flex-Flash and Java Applets. The architecture is essentially the same. Adobe even offers a desktop runtime named Air which enables Flex-Flash applications to be permanantly deployed to the desktop and run stand-alone. We're back to thick client-server architecture, and stand-alone desktop settings.

Flex visual components are defined using a declarative language similar to JSF, but named MXML in Adobe's case. The Flex compiler generates ActionScript from MXML, which is converted to byte code, which runs in the Flash player, which has a Jit process that converts byte code to x86 machine instructions. So you begin to see the many similarities with Java desktop architecture. I'm beginning to see that Adobe RIA's are really desktop applications, but deployed over the web.

It's more clear to me why web portals become less useful in the case of Flex-Flash applications, and the motivation to embed some sort of menu system within the applications themselves, including logic to toggle between multiple concurrent applications. Portals typically use <iframe> or <div> elements for separate applications, but in the case of Adobe's RIA's that would mean launching multiple instances of the Flash runtime, which would be highly resource intensive - something akin to running multiple JVM instances.

This is something of a shock to me because it's in such stark contrast to my ideology for enterprise class systems.

Nathan.