Aral Balkan

We are living in exciting times. Macromedia just released four very important pieces of news. What are these announcements, what do they mean to you, the Flash/Flex/RIA developer and what indicators do they give regarding the future of the Flash and RIA worlds? Let's explore each question in turn.

What was announced?

The first announcement is that Macromedia has joined the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse, as you may already know, is an open source extensible rich client platform for creating development tools.

The second announcement concerns the first fruit of this membership, which will be the new Flex IDE to replace Flex Builder, code named Zorn.

Thirdly, Macromedia has unveiled the Flash Platform. What is the Flash Platform? According to Macromedia:

"The Flash Platform is a complete system. It includes a universal client runtime, an openly published file format (SWF) specification, a robust programming model, time-tested development tools, dedicated server technology, integrated solutions, and the support of major systems integration partners, ISVs, and OEMs."

So, finally, the Flash ecosystem has an official name: The Flash Platform. This is important because we are finally calling an apple an apple. Flash is a platform and has been for a while now. The universal client runtime that the release refers to is non other than the Flash Player -- which we should start calling the Flash Virtual Machine. Also, although not stated in the brief excerpt above, it can't go without mention that a vital part of the Flash Platform is the existence of a vibrant open source community.

Finally, Macromedia has officially previewed the next Flash Player, codenamed Maelstrom.

What do these announcements mean for you?

Macromedia joining the Eclipse Foundation is great news for developers. The existence of a Flex IDE in Eclipse is the next logical step in the evolution of the Flash Platform. Many Flash developers have already started evaluating and using Eclipse for Flash development using FAME/FAMES/etc. and this latest announcement means that they can continue to do so knowing that they will be able to reuse their Eclipse knowledge in Zorn.

The move also signals a greater embrace of open source tools and technologies by Macromedia. A move that is mirrored in their current support for and stance towards open source Flash projects such as OSFlash, MTASC, ARP, etc. I have no doubt that we will see interesting developments in this area in the coming days!

Finally, the new Flash Virtual Machine, with features such as expressiveness features, File Upload, enhanced Video and improved performance is great news and will make it easier for Flash developers to create richer RIAs.

Comments

• I think I remember the whitepaper stating Zorn will be for Flex, which I guess makes sense unless Macromedia either wanted to support an external compiler (MTASC) which is doubtful, or release a standalone compiler, flashc.exe, which again is doubtful for several reasons...
  
  This is the potential dilemma. Just how different is using Flex through Zorn (via the non-server-deployed Flex workflow), and FAMES with either a client side XML UI markup, or an Eclipse plug-in that allows for MXML > SWF code generation as part of the process, possibly through code injection as the compiler is called upon?
  
  Technically, not a great deal of difference, but an enormous price hike depending on which route you take. Still seems a little blurry at the moment as to how different the workflows will be.

  by Richard Leggett on 2005-06-06 19:23:15

• I couldn't agree more with you Aral, these are very exciting times. In such a short period of time things have changed dramatically to the better for the Flash developers.

  by Kim Hansen on 2005-06-06 22:13:30

• Aral,
  
  You've assumed, and probably correctly, that Zorn will replace FlexBuilder. I hoping Zorn will generate SWF from MXML and that would be exciting!

  by Chris Velevitch on 2005-06-07 03:50:09

• Nice overview of all recent exciting press releases, thanks. It is great to see that MM (still) recognizes the value of the Flash community and invests so much in it.

  by Martijn de Visser on 2005-06-07 11:00:52

• I'm really looking forward to Zorn, and hoping for some tightly integrated debugging abilities. That's what kills me on time now.

  by Tariq Ahmed on 2005-06-15 20:25:35

• Code injection using MTASC + ECLIPSE 3.4 ? I cant see any text about that out there. I found one that involves Flashout which is uninteresting since SOS Max is much better and works with current version of Eclipse. How do you inject code into an as 2.0 project using mtasch and eclipse FDT.

  by Thomas on 2008-09-16 13:00:27