Open at Adobe

Ajax,Flex,Video,standards

Hopefully by now you know about Adobe and the open sourcing of Flex.

But do you know about Adobe and Ajax in both open source and in standards?

So, let me tell you.

First Adobe is a member of the Open Ajax Alliance, an an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.This is a very active, very committed and very, very open organization. Adobe is proud to be a member, and we take part in a number of different working groups and task forces.

In fact, we recently proposed a new task force, on searchability. Yeah, I know, you know how to search Ajax... right? Well, from the Task Force proposal:

While the impact of AJAX has been substantially expanded, the impact of the overall search ability of web sites may be adversely affected by the use of AJAX. Complex web sites built with content from an XML source are often essentially invisible to search engines. While suggestions for workarounds exist, no clear or sufficient methods exist within practices today.

We believe this is a significant lack within AJAX and would offer that OpenAjax is the appropriate venue to resolve this lack.

To accomplish this, we would propose the start of a task force to bring together the framework developers and the search engine companies to help identify which hooks are necessary and possible.  

The desired end goal would be that even in complex web sites which are built entirely using an AJAX framework with all of the data presented via asynchronous XML, there is still sufficient metadata/context available to search engines such that they can understand the content of the application AND provide deep linking into those applications.   The idea is to extend the AJAX frameworks so that they include the metadata necessary for search engines to understand the data that is flowing through an Ajax application as well as the context/state within an application that is associated with that data.

 The end product would be a set of best practice recommendation for frameworks that would be compatible with the major search engines or a set of recommendations to other working groups or task forces.

Now, as a standards wonk (and a cat), I'm not actually capable of groking this. But it seems that creating a dynamic web site based on my request (for catnip brownie recipes) might not be searchable, thus considering googling, it doesn't exist. I'm sure you have workarounds, but a standard way of making this searchable has to be good for the adoption of Ajax.

Continuing on the Ajax theme for a minute, are you aware that Adobe has things that can help you bridge technologies like Flash and Ajax? It's called the Flash-Ajax Video Component and is open source code.  Yep, open source. Free as in BSD license. FAVideo is a small, open source Flash component that you can use to provide video playback within an Ajax application. It exposes all of the formatting and video playback controls necessary to build a video player customized entirely using HTML and Javascript.

How about the Flex Ajax Bridge, part of the Flex SDK we open sourced under MPL? FABridge ) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser."

"To humbly borrow a page from the Ruby on Rails community, FABridge " is built with the “don’t repeat yourself” principle in mind. Rather than having to define new, simplified APIs to expose a graph of ActionScript objects to JavaScript, with FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. After you insert the library, essentially anything you can do with ActionScript, you can do with JavaScript."

Or Spry, a framework for Ajax. "The Spry framework for AJAX is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring AJAX to the web design community who can benefit from AJAX, but are not well served other frameworks." It's also under the BSD license.

Anyway, I thought you'd like an insight into what Adobe is doing in openness around Ajax.

As always, comments (and cat treats) welcome.