At its annual user conference this week, Adobe took aim at Microsoft and Google by introducing some collaborative applications to flesh out the rich client development platforms and runtimes currently in the pipeline.
The highlight included announcements of document-centric apps intended to populate its rich client platforms. They included “Share,” a free online document sharing service that will enable users to make documents available for mashups, and the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, which provides an online word processor that you can use to create those documents.
Adobe and Virtual Ubiquity weren’t exactly strangers, as Adobe was initially one of the investors in the 10-person startup. Virtual Ubiquity’s product, “Buzzword,” is an online word processor that is built on Adobe’s Flex framework and runs on the AIR (Adobe Interactive Runtime) cross-browser environment that is currently in beta.
Most of the features in the beta 2 versions of AIR and Flex have been previously announced over the past few months. And, according to Pam Deziel, director of product management for Adobe’s platform business unit, those features at this point are release candidates for the final release versions, which should happen early next year.
However, for the AIR run time, Adobe is introducing a new security model that will probably not be finalized for the first production release. Specifically, it is a new HTML security model that creates a couple distinct “sandboxes” for the Ajax logic and the browser rendering, respectively. “We’re very concerned about classic web development techniques that give you access to system-level APIs,” said Deziel, in making the case for the new security mechanism.
Because this constitutes a significant departure, and adds another set of hurdles, for web application developers, Adobe is throwing this out to the developer community as part of the AIR open source project. In all likelihood, this will take at least one or more revs before it winds up in production versions of AIR.
Last but not least are, literally, the latest bells and whistles to Flash Player 10. There’s little revolutionary here, with the enhancements largely incremental. They include improved text handling and upgraded 2 ½ and 3D rendering. At the MIX conference, Adobe offered a “sneak peak” and has not disclosed any delivery schedule yet, given the preliminary state of the new version.
Given that this is Adobe’s primary customer showcase for the year, it's not surprising that they would roll out definitive versions of frameworks currently in the beta pipeline. What was interesting, but not surprising, is that Adobe is now trying to roll out some application content to makes its development and run time frameworks more than flashy.
That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s old news that the combined whammy of Google and Web 2.0 is now giving Microsoft its first real competition for control over the rich desktop. Thanks to its ubiquitous search and ad-sense advertising engine, Google is the first rival with a war chest and market penetration adequate to mount a credible challenge Microsoft. With Web 2.0, there is now a platform in play that could challenge the dominance of Windows.
So Adobe has had little choice but to step up tot plate and go beyond the delivery of pure development and run time frameworks. The question is whether in the battle between Google and Microsoft, it could get caught between a rock and a hard place.
