in my experienceApril 23, 2003 8:53 AM
The Macromedia session was pretty interesting for a few reasons. First, they took the term "Rich Internet Application" and hijacked its meaning to strictly mean a Flash based internet applications. Most of the folks in the session have likely worked on web applications they would consider to be rich internet applications, but contained no Flash code whatsoever. But that's not the point. They were showing off their technology and it was at least interesting.
The second interesting point I posed directly I to one of the Macromedia guys. Does deployment of these apps in production environments suffer from any single points of failure? The reason I care is that the environment I work in is based on production systems where stuff can't break. the architecture they described is essentially a three tiered web app with data modeling, business/application logic and presentation layers, all done with Macromedia products (Any DB you want to use, ColdfusionMX, Flash; respectively). The answer to my question... it's all load balanceable.
Now, back up to the presentation layer. The current web page interaction architecture is based on a request then a response. Compiled applications on your computer aren't and interact in real time. Macromedia, along with Laszlo Systems is working on a putch where these Flash based web applications will bring more usable, dynamic and immediate experiences to the folks who need/want to get something done on the web. It's a good vision, if building Flash wasn't such a hassle.
[Meeting note: I met Danny Goodman at this session. That was cool.]