The Open Web Is Slow

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Kevin Dangoor has a post over on SitePen that starts like this:

“We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”.”

As a Flex developer building on Flash, I have to laugh at that statement because in the rest of the article Kevin goes on to dismiss Flash as part of the “Open Web” when Flash has been a huge, huge driver in the browsers supporting richer functionality. It’s Flash that has been pushing video on the web, it’s Flash that has been pushing animation and rich content, and it’s Flash that has been pushing vector graphics. And developers are responding by adopting Flash. It’s taken the browsers years to get to this stage and the popularity of Flash has helped light a fire under the people who are looking to narrowly define the open web and get them to make real, valuable enhancements to the browser and standards.

I also think some of Kevin’s attack on Flash shows he doesn’t understand the platform and how Adobe is working to add the traits of the open web as defined by someone from the Google Gears team. The first is view source. Kevin may not think view source is a core part of the open web but Adobe made it VERY easy with Flex for any developer to add view source to their Flash applications. We want developers to have a choice but we think the ability to see how something is built is a great driver of community and education.

Another is openness. Kevin and many, many other people think that because the Flash Player isn’t open source it can’t be considered part of the open web. He talks a bit about why open is so important and uses the example of Microsoft and it’s terrible support for IE after it “won” the browser wars. When in the history of Flash has Macromedia/Adobe exhibited any of that behavior? As a company we listen very closely to our community and even before Silverlight we continually pushed innovation in the Flash Player. That’s part of the reason the browsers are still trying so hard to catch up. We innovate because we want our customers to keep building great applications on our platform. Not to monopolize anything.

Kevin also lauds Microsoft for being open by pointing to the Moonlight project and using it as an example that someone could create an open source version of Silverlight for any platform. Luckily one of his commenters sets him straight. Moonlight works partly because of the work on the Mono project, the Linux implementation for .NET. I’d love to see someone try and get away with creating an alternate implementation of .NET on the Windows platform or try anything without working for/with Novell.

Adobe is an incredibly open company. We’ve released the Tamarin project, the VM for the Flash Player, as an open source project. We’ve open sourced Flex. We’ve open sourced BlazeDS which enables rich, real time data communication. And we’ve opened up the AMF specification which is a much faster way to transfer data between clients and servers. We’ve been a long time supporter of our runtimes on Linux which includes a public beta of Adobe AIR. We continually solicit feedback from our community, our customers, and our partners in making sure that we innovate on our tools and our platform.

Furthermore, we want to engage with the open web. We think that it benefits everyone if Adobe’s rich platform and the browsers/standards committee all continue working towards a richer web. We want to be a part of that discussion and in some cases we’re leading by example. We’ve set a pace of innovation that I hope everyone can follow and gets the standards bodies to keep moving forward and browsers to continue to build in more functionality. Instead of constantly going back to the fact that the player isn’t open sourced, I think more open web advocates should engage Adobe in meaningful, constructive conversation about the future direction of the web. RIAs are setting the standard and people are adopting them based on the fact that they’re a superior technology. Talking about how we can all move forward together instead of acting like the open web is under siege will result in a lot more progress.

Note: I’m heading to bed, so if you comment but it doesn’t show up, I apologize. I’ll approve all the ones stuck in the queue when I get up in about 8 hours. I’m not trying to hide your comment or anything.

[tags]Open Web, Flash, Standards, Open Source[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. Do I Really Care if The Flash Player is Open Sourced? Not So Much
  2. Adobe at the Open Source Conference
  3. A Place For the "Open" Web and the "Closed" Web
  4. Is Being Too Open with Products a Bad Thing?
  5. A Slow, Bummin’ Summer
  • http://blog.natejc.com Nate Chatellier

    Thanks for the great post Ryan!

    Please see my response: Re: The Open Web is Slow

    (Oh, and btw, Adobe published a Linux ALPHA of Adobe Air, not a beta ;o)

  • Anonymous

    You wrote: “I’d love to see someone try and get away with creating an alternate implementation of .NET on the Windows platform or try anything without working for/with Novell.”

    Okay I understand what you are saying about someone subverting dot net’s growth path away from Microsoft.

    At the same time it’s important to note that Microsoft hasn’t controlled mono, and it’s really coming into it’s own. Ask Telligent if you don’t believe me on that one.. They are a vendor who is doing applications that are Mono compatible in .NET. I don’t think Novell has contributed much to MONO which was built out nicely before Silverlight.

    It’s also important to note, that when moonlight does show up in 1.0 and 2.0 varieties it will be a direct copy of the functionality that anyone can look at and use.. The codecs of course are still automatically downloaded from Microsoft do to strict IP policies on them. But how unopen is it when you will obviously have a look at the base classes and functionality.

    This Microsoft is the “enemy” thing the by the commenters you refer to, is typical and a very old view and doesn’t represent the situation for what it really is. They seem to be just as open as Adobe (check out the number of open source projects on Codeplex). Both companies seem to be aiming at a great interoperability story.

    AIR has a wonderful interoperability story and is a great product.. It’s interesting that AIR a “desktop” runtime gets compared to “Silverlight” a browser based Runtime, but there is not that much mentioned in time about WPF (Windows Platform Applications) and a comparison of services available for them versus AIR. In a sense with Mono, .NET has been available and portable to Linux for a long time.

  • http://form-function.blogspot.com/ Tom Gonzalez

    Ryan,

    I couldn’t agree with your more. I believe that Adobe is making an amazing transformation at navigating the tricky waters from being a closed source company to strong supporter and evangelist for the open source community. I can only reference my experience participating on private betas at companies like Microsoft, BOBJ, etc… The culture Adobe has fostered (at least around flex/air) is a very transparent, cooperative culture, which lies in stark contrast to a company like Microsoft where beta’s are very closed and you are made to feel like a privileged second class citizen to be part of their beta’s. I think Apple could take a page or two out of the Adobe playbook when it comes to supporting its developer community.

    At this point what does it really matter if flash is “closed” Honestly I think it is better that way, look at all the “open” standards that no one can agree upon, thus the dysfunction of the browser. I think that flex/flash/air really achieves what Java set out to do 10 years ago. It is truly “write once – run everywhere.” As a business owner, software architect, and and engineer it is much more enjoyable to focus my energies/time on building new functionality than targeting platforms 1..N for my products.

    - Tom G.

  • Joe

    Valid points, it’s really the customers that decide to be honest. Design houses not making the best of their tools will eventually fade away.

    BTW – Mono works fine on Windows.

  • http://www.blueskyonmars.com/ Kevin Dangoor

    “I also think some of Kevin’s attack on Flash shows he doesn’t understand the platform”

    That’s simply not true. I took Brad Neuberg’s “Open Web” definition (minus the view source requirement, which I thought wasn’t critical), and concluded that “Flex is about as open as can be.” With respect to Flash, I’m not saying that Adobe has to open source the Flash Player. I’m saying that to be part of the “Open Web” by Brad’s definition and by my own thinking on the subject, Adobe has to be open to other people making Flash players as well. If the license terms for the Flash Player SDK were changed, then I don’t see anything contrary to Brad’s Open Web definition.

    I think Adobe has done a very good job of evolving the Flash and Flex platform. The point of openness is securing the future. While there’s no reason to think that Adobe will be unresponsive to user or developer needs in the future, the only way to be sure that the web will continue to evolve optimally is to allow for competition to keep things in check.

    While Gnash has shown that it’s possible to reverse engineer Flash and get somewhere, I think that having an available spec and a real ability to make an alternative implementation is important to the whole ecosystem.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    @Nate, yeah, I’ll fix that. Thanks for pointing it out!

    @Anonymous, I agree both companies are getting more open – and think that’s great – but I don’t think Microsoft should get more credit for being open because they essentially outsourced the Linux versions of their platform. And as I understand the agreements, while Novell is free to work on an open source version of .NET, no other company could pull that off because of the special licensing agreements that Novell signed. Is that incorrect?

    @Tom, thanks for the comment. I think we’re pretty happy with how Flash/Flex/AIR are progressing and the adoption rates seem to agree.

    @Joe, Yup. We just want to provide the best stuff. If we stop doing that, then no one will buy our stuff. So far that hasn’t been an issue.

    @Kevin, sorry for the lack of comment approval. So all you want is the SWF spec to be open? Is that the main crux of openness that you’re looking for? Do you think that would satisfy most people?

  • http://www.fabianvercuiel.com Fabianv

    I am a huge supporter of the movement to create an open web and to use opensource software but I think people are starting to miss the point.

    Most people see this as black and white.. “oh flash player isn’t opensource so everything tied to it is just not open at all!”

    There will always be strong believers and disbelievers. The Ajax community, Silverlight community, Flex community.. they’re all going to have things that they disagree on. But I simply cant tolerate it when people don’t investigate a technology thoroughly before bashing it.

    Adobe is open, Flex is Open, AIR is open. People must start realizing this. Openness is much more important than exposing every last bit of naked sourcecode.

  • http://www.blueskyonmars.com/ Kevin Dangoor

    @Ryan: One point of my blog posting was to test the boundaries of the “Open Web” definition from Brad. I think Brad’s definition wisely left the door open for new technologies. In my opinion, opening the SWF spec to allow alternate player implementations would make Flash “open”. Others may think a standards body needs to be involved, or a “community process” or some such. I’m certainly not going to be the final arbiter on the definition of “Open Web”.

    For me, opening the door for multiple implementations and third party experimentation is “open enough”. (So: short answer to your questions: Yes, Yes, I have no idea)

  • http://tracethis.com Derek Vadneau

    “Adobe has to be open to other people making Flash players as well.”

    Because that’s what developers need, another era of wasted time writing multiple versions of projects in order to reach a wide audience. Err, no thanks. Been there, done that, never want to do that again.

    I pray the power that be never do this.

    Open source to allow contribution is one thing, which I fully support, but to allow derivative works would be a grand mistake and one Flash/Flex developers should fight to keep from happening.

    Call me short-sighted, but I think no good would come of multiple Flash Players.

  • http://www.blueskyonmars.com/ Kevin Dangoor

    @Derek said “Call me short-sighted, but I think no good would come of multiple Flash Players.”

    Just as no good could come of there being multiple web browsers.

    What web browser do you use? The dominant one, or the ones that are clearly superior?

    Competition in the browser space has been important. The IE team was brought back to life based on competitive pressure from Firefox. Would Firefox have put so much effort in performance improvements in Firefox 3 if Safari and Opera weren’t pushing so hard themselves?

    Before people jump on me for what I just said: I’m not trying to compare Adobe to Microsoft circa 2002. My point is that the ability to create multiple implementations is a safeguard against possible stagnation or bad choices in direction for the future.

    And, I should mention that the ability to create alternative SWF players may allow browser creators to do more to make the SWF experience in the browser even better. One never knows what would come up, and that’s part of the point of openness and competition.

    (By the way: you’ll note that I’m not calling for Adobe to open source anything that they haven’t already. I have no issue with them selling closed source, premium editors and tools. Seems like a nice business model to me.)

  • http://www.cyberlinklive.com Hong

    Hi Ryan,
    My comment might not completely related to this topic, but your post does make me really want to share with you what I have seen here in Asia.

    I was the only RD who know Flash platform in a 500-employee software company about a year ago. It was really really hard for me to convince people that Flex is actually the right tool to develop the product they want, until recently, there were 2 new Java developers voluntarily to switch their jobs and joint my team plus the launch of Photoshop Express. Some people started to consider that maybe what I have been saying might be right. Still, lots of C++, .net and Java developers in my company (some of them have even been doing web development for a very long time) thinking that Flash platform causes them too much trouble and would rather go for HTML pages. It is true that they got legacy systems mixing with IIS, Tomcat, SQL Server and so on (I don’t know why they made it so complicated), but Flash platform would not cause any trouble. It is all due to the poor understanding of Flash technology. They gotta do some survey before criticizing it.

    Lots of companies’ owners here in Asia want to build web 2.0 or multimedia websites, but I haven’t seen many of them adopting Flash platform unless they need to play FLV videos. I have even heard that some managers avoid using it… What I would love to see is that someday most of web applications will all run in Flash Player and all HTML pages will be embedded into it (just like what Flex IFrame component can do) instead SWF files been embedded in HTML pages.

    Together, Flash platform will prevail.

    Cheers!

  • http://aralbalkan.com Aral Balkan

    I’m always surprised when Adobe forgets to mention that there is a rich and vibrant Open Source community at OSFlash.org that wasn’t created (and isn’t supported in any way by) Adobe. The existence of OSFlash and the plethora of open source tools and servers _not_ published by Adobe is one of the biggest factors that differentiates the Flash Platform (with its grass-roots developer community) from Silverlight.

  • http://www.fabianvercuiel.com Fabianv

    @Aral – lol dont worry Aral, we still love you

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    @Aral Great point – I do always forget about OSFlash and I think it’s pretty cool. I’ll start mentioning it when these conversations pop up.

  • http://www.matthewfabb.com Matthew Fabb

    Kevin Dangoor: “My point is that the ability to create multiple implementations is a safeguard against possible stagnation or bad choices in direction for the future.”

    The world of plugins is very different from browsers. Despite the Flash player being closed source for the past 10+ years, there’s never been anything close to stagnation, with new advances in each new version of the player. The player has always had some sort of competition whether it be the Java applet many years ago, just with JavaScript itself in certain areas of development, Quicktime when it comes to video and most recently Silverlight.

    Even with competition aside, Macromedia and now Adobe have always have financial incentive to push the Flash player forward, which is to sell new versions of the Flash IDE (and now Flex Builder) that take advantage of the new features in the new version of the player.

    I agree with Derek Vadneau that the opening up the Flash player would be one of the worst thing to happen for a large number of Flash developers. The promise of writing the code once and it working for the most part cross-platform, cross-browser is one of things that attracts both developers and their clients to work with Flash. Also that backwards compatibility, that with the exception of some security updates that Adobe has released in new versions of Flash, everything has stayed 100% compatible. A new browser or rendering engine is not going to effect an old Flash website meaning no maintenance is needed over the years.

    If the player was opened up, yes others would include new features into the player that you might not get under Adobe’s care, but you wouldn’t get to do that on over 90% of computers. Instead there would be all sorts of detection code, with either multiple SWF’s of the same application for different versions of the player, or perhaps bloated SWF’s with the detection built into the application. Flash development and testing would get a lot more expensive, which in some cases would kill certain projects because of the price tag.

    Plus there’s chance that a competitor like Microsoft would introduce their own version of the player that works differently simply in an effort to kill the player, like Microsoft did with Java.

    In the end, I think too much would be lost and very little gained by opening sourcing the Flash player.

  • http://www.blueskyonmars.com/ Kevin Dangoor

    @Matthew: Thanks for the comments!

    Before directly talking about your comment, let me bring it back around to my original article. Brad Neuberg put forth a definition for the heretofore loosely defined term “Open Web”. I tested Flash/Flex and Silverlight against his definition and found that they are both almost there. I never said that Adobe needs to open source the Flash Player, but only to openly specify it so that others can implement Flash Players if they wish.

    From a historical perspective, Microsoft tried to kill Java and failed utterly. And, Sun has opened up Java and has started work on on interesting new directions since then.

    I do actually think that trademarks are an important tool when it comes to open source. Even though Java is open source, only Sun can declare something as being “Java”. The same would apply to Flash (whether Adobe opened up just the spec or the source). Only Adobe would make a Flash Player, unless they chose to certify other players, or whatever.

    By the way, I’m not disputing that a closed source and closed spec Flash can and has been successful. I’m only trying to test the boundaries of what is called the “Open Web”.

    By the way, here are two reasons people might make an independent Flash player that are not incompatible with Adobe’s: 1) more of a security focus, 2) “Free Software”. In fact, those are both reasons that Gnash exists. Whether you think those reasons are important is irrelevant. Some people thought it was important enough to go and build their own player by reverse engineering. And you know what? Their player would be able to be more compatible with Adobe’s, rather than less, if Adobe would open the spec for Flash.

    I do recognize that video codecs likely have patent encumbrances. That’s a separate issue. I can see the Free Software folks wanting to make a player that can play Ogg Vorbis and Theora files. That is incompatible, but not likely to really hurt anyone.

    All of that said, I really don’t want to stray farther afield. I’m not a “Free Software” guy (I happily have a Mac on my desk and run lots of closed source software). I’m just interested in seeing what the definition of “Open Web” really means, since it is a term I have seen used in many places (including the company for which I work).

  • http://www.techper.net/ Tech Per

    While I do like the sudden openness of Adobe on some areas, I don’t quite buy all the marketing talk about it. For instance, it is not at all true, that Adobe has been a long time supporter of flashplayer on linux. Actually, I see that as a slap in the face, of the many linux users, that were without a working, official, flashplayer for years. For those that take the time to check, the history tells us, that Adobe have been *really bad* supporters of their runtime on linux. It is better now. Will it continue to be? Who knows, it is closed!