Home

Adobe Live London 2006: The future of the internet as an applications platform

Toilet Duck 2.0? With much of the conversation dominated by Flash, Ajax and Sparkle you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into the annual convention of toilet cleaning engineers, but no: This was Adobe Live in London. More specifically a late night panel discussion on 'The future of the internet as an applications platform'. With the Macromedia merger now complete this was actually the first time the new unified Adobe had publicly addressed a group of developers. If tonight was any indication of the future then we can expect our new overlords to be open, informed and informal.

May 2006 - report by John Dalziel Moderating the panel was Ben Watson, Group Manager for Enterprise Developer Relations at Adobe. The format was pretty loose. Each of the panelists opened with a couple of minutes of prepared material then questions were opened up to the floor.

Ben's 'hands off' approach to moderation made for a refreshingly open and friendly evening. Letting the audience and panelists steer the discussion, he didn't try to step in even when the conversation inevitably turned to the efforts of his former employer. When questioned on whether Adobe were trying to own the Ajax space with the release of their Ajax for Dreamweaver framework, Spry he joked that there were currently 134 Ajax frameworks in development and that Spry was number 135!

As you would expect it wasn't long before the phrase 'web 2.0' turned up. Its definition though seemed harder to pin down. Bola Rotibi, Senior Analyst for Ovum, asked for a show of hands. With only one brave sole at the back prepared to raise a hand, she ventured that the definition needs to be considered in light of the influence of broadband. Bola's other key point was to stay focused on the goal of the project rather than get sidetracked into which tool or framework has the coolest new feature set.

When referring to the subject of the evening's discussion Andrew Shorten, Adobe Flex Application Engineer, made the important point that the internet is already an application platform. What we're looking at now is how to make the application user experience better for all users. In particular he highlighted the Flex team's work to make their components more accessible.

James Governor from Red Monk is a pretty funny guy for an analyst. He's also opinionated which is no bad thing when it comes to livening up a panel discussion. James opening point was one that came to thread its way through the rest of the evening; Railing against the constraints of DRM "Digital Restrictions Management" he championed the cause of "open data" and went as far as to urge anyone with a website to give it an API to open it up to the rest of the web. He stressed that not only does open data facilitate accessibility it makes entirely new business models possible. Today's mash ups will be tomorrows tech companies.

Andy Hood, Creative Development Director for AKQA, opened with some hilarious tales of user communities from the Xbox 360 launch forums. He also fielded one of the few conversations that managed to produce some disagreement between the panelists: the relative merits of working with XAML and Microsoft's new Expression tools. To his credit he was the only one of the panel prepared to come to Redmond's defence.

Andy's key contribution came during a discussion on how you might persuade your client to open their data. He pointed out the importance of keeping your clients informed and up to date about new trends and technology. An informed client will b be more open to current thinking. The onus is on the developer/agency to keep your clients up to speed and to do this routinely.

London Adobe User group director Aral Balkan rounded out the panel. Picking up the topic of the evening he made the point that we all already use web applications, citing web mail as a longstanding example. Contributing to the discussion on accessibility he made the important observation that accessibility can be a competitive advantage. It should however be scoped and paid for.

As you would expect from the cofounder of OSFlash Aral echoed James' point by calling for "a more liberal sharing of data". He also referred the audience to the Creative Commons project as way of simplifying the legal aspects of sharing data and media.

The night finished off with the obligatory drinkies, tech chat and the smallest burgers I've ever seen. All in all an interesting and informative couple of hours. I still think Toilet Duck 2.0 is going to be huge though - you heard it here first!
visit Adobe

Written by John Dalziel (May 30th 2006)