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I’ve pondered for a while where all this rich web and easier desktop development stuff is headed. I have a couple ideas:

1. Flash player could make your browser irrelevant much like the web browser makes your personal computer irrelevant.
2. AIR can do the same thing for the operating system irrelevant

Let me me explain this in a little more detail. The browser makes your operating system irrelevant (or less relevant) because you can access web based applications from a standard web browser the same way whether you’re on Mac, Windows or Linux. If I use MS Office, like I used too, I’m committed to windows, switching to Mac would be a pain.  If I use Google Apps, I  currently use Gmail and some Google Docs (but not exclusively) I can switch to any operating system or computer for that matter and booya all my tools and data are already there. The only catch is that the browsers do have slight differences that create a significant amount of work for the developers. The Flash player is evolving faster and faster. the browser is stagnating not due to technical challenges but due to battles between vendors and infighting within open-source projects. No single browser has the same mass adoption as the Flash player. Flash is one run-time, not cross-browser. Just having to develop for more than one environment (IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Barf!) should make that self evident. Although this went mostly unknown in both the Ajax and Flash/Flex communities, there was talk after the last Ajax Experience to run WebKit inside of the Flash player (like AIR does kind of) and run all your Ajax in there. One HTML renderer across all browsers via Flash. Ironic eh.

Their proposed solution is this:

1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS as you do today.
2. You test it in ONE browser. Probably WebKit.
3. You include a single JS at the top of your page, a spinoff off of SWFObject.js
4. The JS would instantiate a SWF file which would fill 100% of the height and width of your browser window.
5. The JS would then suck in the HTML of the page, and feed it to the Flash Movie.
6. Then the Flash movie would instantiate WebKit inside it and render the page.

OR

1. Same as above, but instead of a Flash movie, it would be a WebKit native plugin.
2. This would need it’s own JS that was specific to this task.

Sounds like crazy Adobe marketing speak doesn’t it?  Well this was proposed by a group including Brad Neuberg, Glen Lipka and Alex Russell.  None of whom are Adobe fanboys, and open-source advocates to the end. This is totally feasible especially with the advances they’re making in the Flash player and converting C code to Action Script. So there you go our just barely “good enough” technology, Ajax, leveraging the far superior Flash for it’s ubiquity and uniformity to run everywhere.

A similar thing may happen with AIR.  While the war between Windows, Linux and Mac wages on users and developers won’t care, they’ll just turn to AIR.  But AIR isn’t powerful enough to build “real” desktop apps you say?  So what!  Sure it’ll be a while before we have Halo 3 or PhotoShop running and performing in Flash/Flex/AIR, maybe less than a decade though according to Bruce Chizen.  We already have word processors, Wii style games and image management/editing which my grandmother and the lions share of all computer users need and/or use.  I bet Adobe will have more desktop installs of Webkit with AIR than Apple with Safari.  I think a few things have really accelerated Flash penetration in last few years namely video and advertising. I don’t know what the killer driver for AIR adoption is going to be yet.

AIR, Flash/Flex and Ajax can all have a very similar development models, which are already widely used. How many people do you know who can write a little HTML or maybe even Flash?  Probably a few to a lot depending on your scene. How many people do you know who can write Java, C++ or .Net? Probably not as many. Ajax already has one of the fastest uptakes and steepest growth curves of any development technology. When you combine this with the ability to switch at runtime from Ajax to Flex with the same markup, you can imagine hybrid Ajax/Flex developers becoming the norm. So now we’re looking at nearly ubiquitous runtimes and development models. Then you combine the ease of development of the Ajax or Flex world with the power to run existing C code that can run anywhere, well that’s hard to beat.  I guess the one downside is only that one vendor can control most of it, which we’ve experienced before.

I think with a little better tooling, some interesting cross pollination and some innovative companies we could be in a very different place in the near future.

One thing is for sure, the cost of switching applications from a consumers perspective is quickly approaching zero as you’ll be able to run any application or any operating anywhere! Which means user experience becomes king!

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