2006 – A Great Year for Rich Internet Applications

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I’m sitting at a bar in Silver Star, a ski resort in Canada trying to answer as much email as I can before I go back out and brave the cold. As I went through it, I saw a suggestion by a friend to do a top 10 news stories of Rich Internet Applications for 2006. I just started brainstorming ideas and realized what a great year it’s been in our small industry. Adobe released Flex 2 and announced the Apollo project. OpenLaszlo announced “Legals” which will enable RIA developers to deploy both Flash and Ajax applications with relatively little changes in the code. Microsoft jumped in head first starting with Windows Presentation Foundation and then releasing a CTP of “WPF/E” that really impressed a lot of people.

I’m excited to work on the full top 10 this week in between skiing because it’s going to be a lot of fun revisiting all of the announcements and news. I think 2007 is going to be even more exciting than 2006 was, but hopefully we look back in a few years and see that 2006 helped lay the groundwork for a world beyond the browser where people interact with data instead of visit pages.

Everyone have a happy new year and stay tuned for the top 10 post on ZDNet. If you have any suggestions for things that should make the list, I’d love to hear them in comments or over email.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Adobe, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo[/tags]

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  • http://techfeed.net/blog/ Jacob Munson

    Do you know if Adobe will charge for Apollo? I know the player will be free, but I’m curious how much money I’m going to have to spend as a developer, if I decided to use Apollo in a project. I haven’t heard any mention of this.

  • http://www.zeuslabs.us/ Josh

    Jacob, since the Flex 2 SDK is free, I’d say there’s a good chance an Apollo SDK will be free too. Adobe would be silly not to follow the same course if they want fast user adoption. They need the apps out there for users to want to install Apollo.

  • http://www.techfeed.net/blog/ Jacob Munson

    Now that you mention it, I think I heard someone say you could code Apollo apps in Notepad, if you wanted, making it technically free. But for me, that’s a stupid argument, because there are plenty of RIA alternatives out there that I could chose before I resort to coding Apollo apps in a text editor. I’ve got better things to do with my life than stumble around in a non-ide environment.

    That said, I know Adobe needs to make money somehow, but I think charging for your development environment is not the best way. I think they’d be better off giving the whole tamale away, but charge for a ‘premium’ version of the editor that comes with support. Personally, I’m cheap enough that I’ll never use a programming language where you have to buy your dev. environment. That’s why I use CFEclipse for ColdFusion.

  • JB

    Jacob,

    That’s what I’ve been saying all along. I really believe Flex isn’t catching on because the IDE is not free. Its a simple Eclipse plugin yet they charge a few hundred for it! Why should you pay a few hundred dollars for a plugin to a free IDE! I think Adobe should give the IDE and SDK for free and charge just for the data services component and consulting help. I think it would be much better to get user adoption then to charge a lot of money to your current user base with no growth. I don’t see many new people jumping into this market at all. Most are going to AJAX…why? Because its free!

    Not to mention you get someone hooked on Flex and Apollo and they’ll gravitate towards purchasing other products in the Adobe line for web development.

    By using Eclipse as the IDE Adobe is acknowledging that the Java crowd is where the growth potential lies, however, they must not know much about their intended audience. Most Java people use Eclipse because it is open source and free as are many of the plugins. Flex will not be one of their choices keeping it from penetrating into the developers they need to spread adoption.

  • http://www.techfeed.net/blog/ Jacob Munson

    JB,

    Couldn’t have said it better myself.

    Look at some of the most successful software in the history of computers, and almost always there’s one common denominator. You could get a version for free. Doom brought the FPS to the masses by being shareware. Microsoft obtained a monopoly in the browser market by giving IE away for free. Apache has been and continues to be the most popular web server, and it’s free. ColdFusion was the first web scripting language to do everything that it does, but it has never been very popular, because it’s not free (perl and then PHP/ASP quickly took over that market). There are countless other examples.

    Yes, I do know there is popular software that is not free (Photoshop, Windows, etc.), but to take over a market and/or break into a market, you almost always have to compete on price. I fear that Adobe will never understand this.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    “I really believe Flex isn’t catching on because the IDE is not free. “

    Adobe Flex 2 is seeing quite rapid acceptance.

    The deployed Player is free to use, as are the Flex 2 SDK and its compiler. Adobe paid to develop this, and gave it away for anyone to use. Anyone can build with Flex, for free. There are optional development and server tools built atop this free-to-everyone platform.

    What I hear you saying is “Nothing should be available for any cash transaction, except maybe for support services”. Can you clarify further…?

    tx, jd/adobe

  • JB

    John,

    Our argument wasn’t you should not charge for your IDE, but that it would help spread adoption and usage if there were a free version like many others that developers have become accustomed to (see JBuilder, etc). You could then charge for “premium” versions. By charging for your IDE a few hundred dollars, you are turning away many developers who would give it a serious try, thus making adoption much slower. There are too many other great frameworks available other than Flex that satisfy the same requirements at a much lower cost.

    We are just arguing that beyond the Adobe community it does not seem to be spreading as fast as Adobe and evangilists like Ryan would like and we believe that is because of the cost barrier for the IDE. Building a Flex app in Notepad is almost as bad as trying to build a Swing app in Notepad (although not quite).

    I say go ahead and charge as much as you want because yes, you did pay to develop it and it is a good tool, however, just be aware that will turn off a lot of new potential customers and adopters who can get the same benefit with a free framework and a free IDE Eclipse.

    On a side note, I do think its ridiculous to charge for a plugin to Eclipse. Eclipse is free as are most of the great plugins. I’d rather pay the same price for a separate IDE for Flex than for an Eclipse plugin. Seems like I’m getting ripped off somehow that way. Again, just my opinion which really doesn’t matter because I’m one person.

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