They did such an excellent implementation and web-based online applications fits in with Adobe’s strategy for how they’re eventually going to monetize their investment in Flex RIA, that Adobe bought Buzzword.

Buzzword is not an HTML app tho. It’s more like Google Docs done right in RIA. It is pretty cool. Google’s current Docs, Mail, Map and so on need rewriting once one RIA solution stands out to suit their need.

Although I’m admittedly biased, I really think that Adobe is in the most envious position in this market. As you put it:

“In discussions about RIAs, people tend to focus on the R and not to much the I. That is, sure, it’s one thing for these UIs to be nice looking, to be slick, to be “sexy.” ”

And then:

“Oh yes, and tools. There are those with Photoshop and Illustrator plugins to export (and import?) JavaFX components.”

If the R in RIA is *so* important, and Adobe owns the tool market for putting the R in RIA, then I think its going to be pretty tough to compete with the workflow that’s going to come with CS 4 / Flex Builder integration. You can import / export all you want, but true integration (back and forth from design to development, not just export) is going to be a requirement for developers moving forward.

Mike

Mike Potter

Flex Product Marketing

RMH: indeed. The big name RIA people are behind on the enterprise story. They’re all going for the consumer niche now.

Mike: I agree, it’s hard to beat Adobe’s lead at the moment when it comes to the entire suite. We just need that final open sourcing of the Flash player and then it’ll just be a race for who’s the best.

Ben: yes, I think “SOA” – in the most positive version of the term – is a key enabler for all this RIA stuff. RIAs need “content” of some sort to have a reason to exist, and having a good back-end that accesses data and process that actually does something other than showing HD movies will give people a reason to develop and use RIA-based front-ends. Every front-end needs back-end, eh?

So it is SOA at the end of the day and we all get to do whatever we want in whatever language we want and actually run it everywhere no matter what – woot – that’s all that really matters (unless you are a vendor seeking language adoption).

We have all heard it all before, but our optimism increases with each big vendor breath, and our design chops are definitely finally getting up to the task – so I imagine we will take all comers no matter what as we always have and persevere even when it crashes.

:)

This is pretty self serving, but I would like you to address RIA for the Enterprise if possible. That’s where Curl (http://www.curl.com) shines. In the Enterprise the important stuff is performance, security, enterprise IDEs, and ease-of-development. You can’t beat Curl on any of these fronts. Curl is simply a better RIA alternative when it comes to technology and ease-of-development. We’ll make the enterprise our focus and after we own that space we’ll take on mass-consumer applications where ubiquity is our only weakness.

All the best,

I (my company) get so much value from having my dev teams build web RIA apps on Adobe Flex, that I’m rather pleased to cut POs to purchase Flex Builder Pro – return a little appreciation back to Adobe.

So last year I lead a team that built a Flex 2 app, and now we’re on to subsequent efforts using Flex 3. This is the current “simple SOA” stack I’ve specified for our overall Flex-based web RIA architecture:

http://css.dzone.com/news/airgonaut-desktop-airto…

After 22 years in the biz, this is the most satisfying architecture for doing client GUI I’ve yet composed (I’ve done distributed computing system designs since ‘94).