In my opinion, one of the Adobe’s most important goals in regards to adoption of Flash-related technologies is to get attention of the  enterprise architects and developers.

I often speak about Flex in front of the Java audiences. At the time of this writing I do not work for Adobe, but I like their  Flex technology, and often play a role of a volunteer Flex evangelist. During such meetings I’ve  noticed that  the vast majority of the enterprise developers assumes that Flash is useful only for creating and playing  animations, splash intro screens or online ads. They do not  see it as a serious tool applicable for running GUI of  enterprise Web applications. The press speaks about  Flash Player, Flash Animation Engine, Flash media authoring tool…  Not too many people realize that Flash is a virtual machine, that runs literally on each available platform, has a small footprint and runs compiled program files. These files can be produced by pure Flash developers, by developers that use Flex, or by people using Open Laszlo. I’m sure there might be some other less known tools that can also generate these .swf files for Flash virtual machine.

To change this perception, Adobe should modify the name of the Flash Player to something like Flash VM or Flash Player VM. Their marketing department should find a way to add  these two letters to all product brochures and other advertisements. It won’t happen overnight, but people need to start getting used to the fact that it’s not a toy, but a VM  that plays a role similar to Java, offers an easy integration with Java, and is also a cross-platform programming environment.

posted Sunday, 11 June 2006
tags: adobe  flash  flex