Jesse Ezell Blog

At its JavaOne conference, which kicks off in San Francisco on May 8, Sun is promising a major technology unveiling, code-named "Project Indiana."

They would merge the Flex team and the Flash player team, and truely support things like MXML in the player. Why in the world do you need 2 entirely different ways to build applications in Flash? Why doesn't the Flash player itself understand Flex MXML? Why must Adobe's resources be split trying to build, promote, support, and refine two entirely different experiences for application developers? IMO, collapsing the teams into a single team would be the way to go with the introduction of Silverlight, especially considering that just about everyone on the Adobe side touts Flex as the real competitor to Silverlight, not the Flash IDE... yet all the big bucks are behind Flash, not Flex. It seems to be a given that the Flash IDE itself is needlessly complex and horribly inefficient when trying to do anything other than animation. With the push away from animation to more useful tasks, how can Adobe be missing this important step?

First off, let me explain my background for those of you who may not know. Way back in the day, when Flash 4 was the latest and greatest, Macromedia decided to “open up” the Flash file format. They released documentation (which was poor at best) and an SDK (which was horrible at best). I saw the potential here. Finally, the format third party developers could unleash their creativity and usher in all kinds of amazing tools. Unfortunately, the documentation was full of errors and the SDK was so riddled with bugs that you spent more time debugging it than using it. 

Damn. Flash is dead.

SCOTUS found KSR's arguments convincing, ruling that the Federal Circuit had failed to apply the obviousness test. "The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court. "Were it otherwise, patents might stifle rather than promote the progress of useful arts."

Flex is going to be open sourced!

All of the sudden Vista just broke. I can't connect to the internet. Initially, the DHCP client just refused to start. I resolved that problem by granting some permissions and setting a registry key, but I still can't use the internet.

One of the reasons WPF/E is going to give Flash a real run for it's money is the video story. Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. The video story is better just about any way you look at it with Silverlight as far as content providers are concerned. It's cheaper, it's faster, etc.