So why aren’t there equally good tools visual for building open standards based RIAs? Macromind/Macromedia/Adobe have a total of more than 20 years of experience in building timeline based animation tools (the first timeline based UI I know was the Videoworks frontend in 1985). If you would bring that experience to building Flash-like RIAs the open standards based way, that would be a valuable product. Personally I believe that – as soon as tide turns against Flash – Adobe will come up with such a tool – which I would welcome very much!

I’m aware of Adobe Spry from the first days the product was announced, and always had the hope that you’d use that complement the Flex framework, something like an Ajax runtime for Flex.

Thanks for the information on NSAPI (Netscape Plugin) support in Google Chrome Frame, that’s interesting!

btw, the source code to Google Chrome Frame does reveal an NSAPI (Netscape Plugin) interface, in addition to the ActiveX Control (for MSIE/Win) more popularly discussed:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/chrome-frame-not-just-for-internet.html

jd/adobe

Then JavaScript – a lot of promising stories, but let’s see what’s going to happen with IE in the future. Maybe the Google Chrome Frame attempt to improve IE will get the Microsoft guys going.

To make it clear, I’m not saying that there’s no use case for deploying Flash applications in the future. And everyone has to acknowledge the incredible contributions in the field of RIAs, good browser based UIs, and state-of-the-art user experience coming from Macromedia, Adobe and the huge Flash community. The fact that neither Silverlight nor JavaFX have managed to come up with APIs for microphone or webcam access shows that Adobe is still in a good position. But then, the Microsoft WPF/Silverlight team is gigantic, I heard that around 2,5000 people world wide are working on the technology. And that’s a race a smaller company cannot win, you are not going to beat Sun/Oracle of Microsoft when it comes to plug-in or VM development in the long term.

The runtime environment for JavaScript will deliver equal performance to the Adobe Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) within 18 months. But looking at how many companies use Webkit right now (Apple, Nokia, Google, ….), and then Google Chrome on its own shows that the number of engineers developing browser based virtual machines is drastically increasing.

I wonder when we’ll see an “Export as JavaScript” menu in Flash Builder/Flash authoring tool, that would be really a step forwards. Or how about a Flash to JavaScript compiler. Has Adobe never thought of building something like a JavaScript runtime for Flex – not that I expect you to tells us something like that? Laszlo has proven that this can be done, and OpenLaszlo uses the Flex SDK internally.

If I was in Adobe’s position, I’d consider to make JavaScript the 2nd runtime for my whole suite of applications for web designers and developers.

@Angel I’m not convinced that Google will come up with a Firefox version of Chrome Frame. They need Chrome Frame for the Google Apps Premier Edition offering, as many of the businesses still have IE only installed on their machines . Those apps run without any problems on Firefox or Safari/Webkit.

And not all Flash projects have seen attempted ports yet…. ;-)

I think it’s developers who will continue to innovate new projects. They’ll look for the delivery platforms that work. And it’s easier to herd one kitten into a paper bag, than it is to herd six kittens into a paper bag…. ;-)

jd/adobe