I’m catching up on email and feeds today (it’s my week off before I start at Adobe) and one of the things I missed while I was busy was Peter Fisk doing a benchmark of a bunch of different languages in his Smalltalk implementation. The results are pretty cool:

He has a couple of notes over on his blog, and there are some great comments about taking the benchmarks with a grain of salt (and Peter does a pretty good job of explaning his rationale). But that said, ActionScript does really well. C# is obviously going to be blazing, but ActionScript isn’t far behind. One of the cool things about working for Adobe from my perspective is how much the Flash Player engineering team has been able to cram into the player and keep it small. With the open sourced JIT, ActionScript could potentially get even better speed increases.

Disclosure: I’m now working for Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. While I’m employed by Adobe, the opinions here on the blog are my own.

[tags]Peter Fisk, ActionScript, C#[/tags]

Here’s something cool for you on a lazy Sunday, Edward Mansouri over at ApolloApps.com has set up an AIM bot that returns information about the Apollo APIs when you send it a command or class name. To access it, you just need to add ApolloApps as a buddy on your AIM list.

You get back a quick summary of what the class and/or property does as well as a link to the documentation. On Trillian I can’t use the link directly because it adds an extra ‘ but it may work for people using Adium or AIM. It also works for anything in the AS3 documentation so if you’re looking for something from the documentation and you have IM open, this is a quick way to find what you’re looking for.

[tags]Apollo, AIM, ApolloApps[/tags]

When I was down in San Francisco last week I got to hang out in Mike Downey’s cube and interview Chris Brichford about some of the HTML features that will be in the public beta of Apollo (coming soon). He showed us a demo of dragging and dropping text from Apollo to the OS and we also chatted about what the link between JavaScript and Flash will be inside Apollo.

It was a fun interview, but I think I was a little bit too serious as I was interviewing him. I need to smile more. The interview itself is about five minutes, so won’t take too long, and there’s a lot of info there.

[tags]Apollo, Ajax, HTML, Webkit[/tags]

Andre asked me today, “so now that you’re a bonafied RIA expert…is Ajax RIA?”. I think everyone knows my feeling on that….not really. But as part of the platform team, I get to talk about Apollo, and Ajax is one of the things that makes Apollo compelling to a lot of developers. And to be honest, there are some Ajax that have impressed me. One is Bungee Labs‘ Bungee Connect. If I didn’t know better, I would think it was a Flash application.

So where are other sexy Ajax applications? I’m not talking about Gmail or even Google Calendar, I’m talking about applications you could mistake for Flash, the kinds of applications even *I* can’t help but admire (even if they could be built faster with Flash and Flex ).

Update: I should make sure to be clear that I’m not trying to be cheeky here, I genuinely want to see other great Ajax applications, so please, send them my way!
Disclosure: I’m now working for Adobe as an evangelist on the Platform Team.

[tags]Apollo, Ajax, Bungee Labs[/tags]

Big news for me today. I’m joining Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist on the Platform Team. One of the things I get a lot of feedback on is that everyone appreciates me being “neutral” and covering all angles of the rich internet application space. None of that is going to change. In fact, with Adobe, I’ll have even more access and also more resources so that I can do a better job of talking about how important rich internet applications are and how important these great experiences are.

One of the major reasons Adobe wanted to hire me was because I’ve been tracking the RIA world for a while and I’ve been talking to people building awesome applications. At Adobe, I’ll be talking to customers a lot, flying around the world presenting at conferences, and interfacing with developers to find out what they want. Adobe has a long history of being pretty open, but one of my goals at Adobe is to help in keeping them open and accessible – and honest. They want me to keep blogging about all aspects of RIAs and keep getting feedback about what works for people and what doesn’t. I’ll also be able to do a lot of interviews with people at Adobe in the hopes of showing off the cool stuff they’re working on and facilitating a conversation between the people at Adobe building products and the people that are using the products.

I also want to stress that part of the transparency will be following and digging into other technologies. You’re still going to see me talk about Silverlight and OpenLaszlo, especially on the ZDNet blog. I tend to be a very positive guy and I think any big moves in the rich internet application space benefit Adobe. As the space grows, Adobe will do well, so it will be fun to cover the ever expanding realm of RIAs

One thing that should be clear is that this wasn’t a case of Adobe going out and buying me or anything like that. As most of you knew, I’ve been doing Flex development as my day job and then going to conferences and blogging on my own time and money. It was kind of stressful for me to do two full time jobs, and my heart wasn’t in development full time. Adobe gave me an opportunity to do the things that I love; talking to developers and customers, traveling to conferences, and blogging.

Apollo (along with Flash Player and PDF Reader) falls under the Platform Team and Apollo is a technology that I really, really believe in. Getting a chance to talk to customers and developers about Apollo while the product is still growing was too good to pass up. I also get to work with a top notch team. Danny Dura and Kevin Hoyt are my fellow evangelists, two guys that know a lot about what developers are looking for and what Adobe’s strengths are. Mike Downey is my boss, and if you’ve ever met Mike you know how cool that is. I also get to work with Mike Chambers on a daily basis, so the team that I’ll be working with is absolutely awesome.

Everything kind of fell into place this week, and I’m really excited about the new role and getting to talk to more of you about how Adobe can keep moving forward. We’re at a fun time in technology because a lot of big minds are buying into the idea of rich internet applications and a lot of companies are jumping into the game. I want to know what you – the developers, designers, and business people – think is most important and how we can do better by you. Adobe has done a great job I think, and I’m looking forward to keeping them open and accessible. My contact information is on the contact page, so feel free to email me, IM me or twitter me any time.

[tags]Ryan Stewart, Adobe, Apollo, Platform Team[/tags]

I saw this while reading feeds and it was just too good not to post. I want to be clear that I’m not making fun of ‘Sharon T’, I just thought it was really interesting the perception that end users have after reading blogs, news articles and anything else about the RIA space. Anyway, she posted this question in the Technology Questions forum:

Is Silverlight meant to replace Flash and (or) Java? I uninstalled Java and Flash, installed Silverlight…but websites tell me I need to install Adobe Flash.

All of us still have a lot of informing to do, and luckily, she quickly got an answer to her question, so all is good.

[tags]Flash, Silverlight, Java[/tags]

Just a quick heads up that Jeff and I are back together for the most recent Flex Show episode. In this one we run down some of the Flex news, announce the contest winners and then also talk a bit about Silverlight and JavaFX. If that sounds interesting, check out the show here.

[tags]Flex Show, Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX[/tags]

Valleywag has a post about Apollo and Silverlight. It continually pains me that Apollo and Silverlight get talked about in the same context, but be that as it may, Valleywag does come through with some funny bits. In the post, they provide some talking points for everyone who’s looking at this whole RIA world and comes away confused. And to be honest, there is a lot to be confused about. Everyone and their mother is jumping into the RIA space and the “news” that comes out is a mixture of hype and reality.

So go read the Valleywag post and consider a couple of things. One, Valleywag is talking about Rich Internet Applications. That’s pretty awesome from where I sit. When the niche you follow is being satired on a Silicon Valley gossip blog, that means good things are ahead. Two, most of the talking points are correct. The lines here are fairly clear cut. You could look at that to mean we’re rehashing all the same arguments, but I look at it as the fact that this whole thing has a lot of traction and a lot of growth for everyone.

So Valleywag, you’ve lost some luster since firing Nick Douglas, but this one made me chuckle. Bravo.

[tags]Silverlight, Apollo, Adobe, Microsoft, Valleywag[/tags]

Just saw Twittervision 3D thanks to Jeff Barr’s twitter. It’s a really cool play on Twittervision, but it’s a 3D globe that rotates around depending on where the Tweet comes from. It looks like it’s implementing Poly9‘s free 3D globe. Very cool!

I got this announcement on Monday but hadn’t heard about the Flash Media Solution Provider program so didn’t have a good feel for what the announcement meant for Flash. After doing a little bit of research, while not  groundbreaking, it’s an interesting move. First here’s the official run down from the press release:

 Adobe is expanding the Flash Media Solution Provider (FMSP) program and collaborating with additional companies to grow the ecosystem for Adobe Media Player. New members of the FMSP program include: Brightcove, ExtendMedia, Maven Networks, and thePlatform. Additionally, companies collaborating with Adobe and supporting the Adobe Media Player include Blip.tv, FeedBurner, Motionbox, Podbridge, and Reality Digital. These companies will help expand Adobe’s Internet video solutions, adding to an emerging ecosystem that enables new ways to distribute and monetize media, while helping viewers discover and view high-quality content both online and offline.

From what I can tell, the Flash Media Solution Provider program is basically just a series of partners who customers can hire to bring in Flash Media Server talent. But the Adobe Media Player angle is kind of interesting. The names on that list are very significant, so if they’re planning to support the Adobe Media Player (AMP) (see a video of AMP here and another on beet.tv) that could help it get a lot of traction.

Think about FeedBurner supporting AMP feeds out of the box, so any person can customize their vodcast FeedBurner feed to work with AMP. The same with Blip.tv and Motionbox, two of the bigger web 2.0 video sites. The fact that Adobe has gotten sign off from these means that AMP could have a bigger place in the web 2.0 ecosystem than I thought at first. Kind of a cool announcement for people who want to share their content.

WebProNews had some additional info.

[tags]Adobe Media Player, Flash Media Solution Provider, FeedBurner, Blip.tv, Motionbox[/tags]