Software vendor Macromedia plans to overhaul the standard user
interface for Web applications.
According to Jeremy Allaire, chief technology officer for
Macromedia, there are two issues that have previously held back the
proliferation of Web applications - the lack of a truly interactive
Web interface, and the inability of previous generations of
applications to interact with other applications and
services.
"HTML is unable to fulfil the interactivity required by
applications," he said. "As it is essentially a document browsing
technology, what you get is a sequence of Web pages, and because
you have to wait eight seconds for each page to load, you lose the
context of the application."
"On the development side, applications are often created in 'silos'
and are independent of each other which makes interaction
difficult," he said.
While current and upcoming Web services standards like XML and Soap
are expected to solve the problem of interactivity, Macromedia
wants to revolutionise the user interface.
As such, it is aiming its Flash MX technology to enable rich
universal client capability, something that Java and DHTML never
achieved.
"Instead of five pages, you have one page that changes as data
streams into it," said Allaire. "The graphical user interface also
improves as the object model in Flash is richer than any HTML
page."
Apart from a better user interface, Macromedia also touts the cost
advantages of its Web model.
"Operating costs are lower because it relies on the client for more
processing," said Allaire. "Etrade uses this technology for stock
quotes and where it previously sent about 100Kbytes of data per
request, it is now down to 2Kbytes. As a result, bandwidth
requirements have eased, as well as the server load."
The small footprint also makes it suitable for the mobile
environment, he said, and Macromedia has integrated it with J2ME
(Java 2 Micro Edition) as well as PocketPC and Symbian.
"We also have the ability to do realtime communications with audio
and video," Allaire added.
Macromedia has recently launched a suite of integrated tools for
developing Internet solutions - from HTML pages to rich Internet
applications. Apart from Flash MX, the suite also comprises other
developer tools like Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, FreeHand, as
well as the ColdFusion MX Java-based application server.
As competition is steep in the application server arena with
players like IBM's Websphere, BEA's WebLogic, and Sun Microsystems'
iPlanet, all providing alternative platforms, Macromedia has
ensured that its ColdFusion MX product interoperates with all of
these. Java classes and Enterprise Java Beans in those environments
are exposed to the scripting engine as ColdFusion components, and
conversely, ColdFusion components can be wrapped as Web
services.
While applications built with Flash MX technology will require
users to download the appropriate runtime environment - the latest
Flash 6 player - Macromedia sees this as a natural upgrade.
"With Flash already on 83% of Internet desktops, it is a most
ubiquitous application," said Allaire. "We've now transformed it
into a rich client runtime."