Open at Adobe

Adobe thinks this harmonization effort is a good thing. However, some blogs and comments have come out with the perspective that Adobe has “lost” the standards battle on ActionScript as a standard.

So let’s try to set the story a bit straighter.

Adobe (and Macromedia before) has been part of the revitalized ECMAScript efforts for a long time. The evolution of ECMAScript after the publication of the now current ECMA-262 in December 1999 [http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm] had stalled and as the web evolved, it was clear that the standard needed to be re-examined. Macromedia was a key part of that restart.

Standards (as I’ve mentioned before) do not drive innovation; rather they are desirable for setting a baseline of commonality. Since ActionScript is based on ECMA-262, it made sense for Adobe to offer it as a point for consideration as a basis for starting discussion on the next ECMAScript.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many standards, the situation became a tug of war. Standards aren’t just about the good of the community; they are also now recognized as competitive advantages. A new standard for ECMAScript thus became mired in a morass of bickering, infighting, and sometimes, out and out name calling; the politics of competition. It became clear that members could not arrive at the consensus needed to allow a decade of advancements to be incorporated into the next generation of ECMAScript.

Adobe is for standards. Standards make it possible to interoperate, intercommunicate and build rich experiences. I’ve stated that openness is like a conversation, in that we need a standard basis for understanding. We’re aligned with the needs of the web in stabilizing ECMAScript. This harmony will allow at least some improvements, updating of the existing standard, and for us to all be able to “talk” on the web with every one.

However, the web has evolved, and innovation is needed to continue to deliver rich applications and access to information. Adobe will continue to provide innovative technology through continuing to advance ActionScript (which, as mentioned, itself is based on ECMAScript).

We’ve already taken the steps to make sure that this innovative technology is available to everyone through release to open source of the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and the Tamarin VM (the virtual machine for ActionScript ). Open source is yet another aspect of being open. Open source powers innovation, just as standards tend to stabilize commonality. Using the conversation metaphor, open source allows us to talk in ways we might not have had in the past, whether it is in new words or new jargon. We’ll continue to work with all the groups, such as Open Ajax Alliance, Eclipse, Linux Foundation, as well as the standards groups defining the web.

In short, we agree with the necessity of the Ecma TC39 ES harmony effort. We’ll continue to be involved, in both ES Harmony and in future generations of ECMAScript. We will track Ecma efforts within ActionScript but won’t stop innovating ActionScript, which millions of developers rely on and is key to so many incredible web experiences today. It’s in our charter to make it possible to push the limits of what can be done on the web. We’ll continue to work with and for the community of folks who want to build the best the web can offer.

I invite you to join Adobe and myself in a conversation about where the web is going to evolve, built on a stable, mainstream base of standards.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

At the recent Internet World conference in London, Nitot of Mozilla made several remarks that included Adobe as an threat to the open nature of the internet.

Needless to say to those who watch the space, some of Nitot’s comments don’t reflect reality. I’d like to take a moment to clarify issues about Adobe Flash Player Adobe support for Linux, and Adobe open efforts.

Adobe delivered Flash Player 7 for Linux back in 2004. Flash Player 9 for Linux is now available and in 2007 Adobe committed to release future versions of Flash Player Linux simultaneously with Windows and Macintosh. I have Flash Player on my Macintosh OSX 10.5, Ubuntu 8.04, and Windows XP. Go here to see the version you have for yourself (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507)

My version shows 9.0.124.0 on all of them. While I didn't test it, I'm told you can also add Solaris to that list as well.

It’s true we aren’t able to support every single Linux distribution and we know that Linux users want Flash Player for 64b Linux. But Adobe works hard to support the most popular distributions for Flash Player (and Adobe Reader) just as we do with the other operating systems.

Adobe may not deliver all of our software as open source but we firmly believe in the power of the open web. Flash Player isn’t open source. But Adobe, with a group of industry partners just announced the Open Screen Project. As our part of the project, Adobe removed all restrictions on using the file format that drives the Flash technologies, SWF and FLV/F4V. With the release of AMF in February along with BlazeDS, and an upcoming release of Flash Cast, Adobe is equally committed to making sure the web, at least our part, stays open.

Other open activities from Adobe include contributing the ActionScript Virtual Machine as open source to Mozilla’s Tamarin project. This is the same open source AVM in Flash Player 9 and Adobe AIR. Adobe is actively engaged in the Tamarin project. Providing Flex -- a free open source framework for building RIAs, which includes the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, and the ActionScript debugger from the SDK. Additionally, other major portions of Adobe AIR, such as Webkit (the HTML engine) and SQLite for the local database functionality are open source today.

The power of the web is found in its global reach, open exchange and access to all. Adobe recognizes that the extended web, reaching from devices to desktops needs to be equally open and as such is removing barriers that will enable content creation, applications and access to spread widely.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 10:43 PM | Permalink

Well, while it's not "done" done., the ballot on PDF for Draft International Standard (DIS) is in.  The ballot closed 2-Dec-2007, and the results are overwhelmingly in favor of approval for ISO 32000 PDF.  93% said yes, which is a clear indication of the importance of PDF throughout the world, and to the solid nature of the underlying PDF specification.

Now this was a lot of effort to pull together. We did follow a "lobby-free" policy with this effort.  We did answer concerns when we were asked to clarify.  We did log a few air miles when invited to discuss this in public forums. And we also took the PDF specification 1.7, removed any product dependencies, and created a world class draft standard. There was involvement in many groups within Adobe, engineering, products, marketing, legal, and the commitment from everyone to make this happen. And maybe a few of us lost some sleep over the last few days waiting for the result .

The next phase of standards is more difficult. Creating a formal standard from a good de facto standard used by thousands of independent products is, well, not easy, but straightforward. Creating a new standard, or moving a standard requires dedicated, knowledgeable people who can spend the time and energy to create a specification that enables movement  from the old and still keeps pace with use and technology. Finding those people is hard, getting their time is harder.

Adobe will work with ISO as it enters into the next phases of this standards process, and the company looks forward to collaborating with a global team that will continue to improve future ISO PDF standards. But Adobe is now just part of that global team.

So watch this space for updates... and I'm going to go catch a nap.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:40 AM | Permalink

As you should know by now, Adobe released the Flex SDK off to open source. And now, you can get the Flex Builder on Linux.

Available on labs , this is the first release (Public Alpha) of a tool to let you build apps with Flex on and for Linux. It's not the full blown Flex Builder (yet) but we wanted to let you get an early look so you can tell us what you think and what you want.

So go get it, drop by the forums, and tell us what you think.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:27 PM | Permalink

open source,live chat,Q&A,Flex,Ajax,RIA,AIR

Tomorrow, Adobe is hosting a live chat session on topics relating to RIA. and I'm polishing up the claws (just kidding).

You know RIA, Rich Internet Applications?

We're going to be chatting and answering questions on topics around Adobe on AIR, Flex, AJAX, and even (ta-da!) open source by yours truely.  Well, I'm not going to answer the AIR, Flex, or Ajax stuff... we have really smart folks to do that.

But I'll be on hand to talk about openness at Adobe, and attempt to answer questions you might have. I won't claim to have all the answers, but just asking us questions could have an impact on wher Adobe goes in the open source world.

You'll be able to find the chat via a banner off the OSDN sites: Sourceforge and Slashdot.

or off Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/go/rialivechat.

The live Q&A session starts at a web browser near you at 4PM Eastern on September 18th, 2007 and runs till 6PM Eastern. So starting at 4AM Wednesday for China (Beijing), 5AM Wednesday for Japan (Tokyo), 10PM Tuesday for Germany (Berlin), 9PM for the UK (London), 6AM wednesday for Australia (Sydney), and so forth.

Anyway. I'm hoping to meet a bunch of you tomorrow and hear the questions you've got on RIA, AIR, Flex, Ajax, and especially on Open Source.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's a nice simple lazy day. And I'm too darn comfortable to do  any actual heavy lifting.

So, I thought I'd point out a new blog from one of my Adobe colleagues, Jim King.

Jim is the PDF Architect for Adobe. He's also the principal technology lead for the effort to promote PDF as an ISO standard. He is articulate, has well thought out reasons and proposals, and is a nice guy. Well, given that he admits to coding a PDF document by hand, he's a nice guy <grin>.

Jim has started a blog to help keep you informed on the open efforts for ISO PDF. Note that I say "open" here. At Adobe, we recognize that buying your way into a standard is never a good thing, We'd rather have the best standard for the community needs, and Jim and his team have spent a lot of time working on what we submitted to ISO for consideration. We're already been told by experts outside of Adobe that this is the best PDF specification that has ever been produced.

Anyway, I want you to rush over and check out Jim's blog, Inside PDF right now. Now, or I'll shed on you.

And I'm going back to snoozing.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)