A sense of validation is always nice - especially when you are so far ahead of the curve. I was scanning through my Google Reader Link Blog recently and noticed the number of new applications being implemented in Flex/Flash and Apollo - Adobe’s desktop runtime for RIAs.

Microsoft recently joined the game officially with the launch of version 1 of it’s Silverlight rich interaction delivery platform and while it’s some way behind Flash/Flex as a platform, it’s gaining popularity too - and has a lot of things going for it (a topic for another post).

I want to focus on Adobe preview of a new product last week at the Photoshop World - Photoshop Express, which is an entry-level Photoshop branded product aimed at drawing customers into the world of Photoshop. What’s special about Photoshop Express is that it’s hosted and implemented using Flex (the development environment for Flash).

This is a continuation of Adobe’s recent focus on the hosted model - Adobe had put out a hosted video editing tool, Remix that has been available as part of the Photobucket tool-set for about 6 months. This video tool has other nearly identical avatars - it also exists as Adobe Premiere Express and is provided on Youtube as Youtube Remixer.

This is the best possible advertisement for the Flash platform’s power. As a developer, there is nothing that screams out a platform’s strength than a complex image/video processing software implemented in it! And there are more coming out everyday!

Flash/Flex has been rounding up some well known names in its corner. I am very impressed with the way Adobe has targeted and honed the direction of the Flex/Flash platform after it adopted Macromedia. The AIR platform (formerly known as Apollo) which has gained a lot of steam since it’s launch is another crucial step in that direction.

What direction is that? Flash is no more seen as the delivery tool of the infamous banner ads. It is now perceived as a serious platform for rich and complex application delivery used by the big boys of the internet and increasingly, the enterprise.

Which brings me to the sense of validation I was talking about - Long before Adobe and the others, Osellus was one of the first “serious” product companies to recognize the power and potential of Flash as a platform and employ it to develop a complex visual enterprise-class product. IRIS Process Author is an enterprise-class visual process management product currently being used by very qualified process groups in very large organizations - and its primary authoring interface is implemented in Flash and the IRIS Flash Framework!! We just happened to start 5 years ago and given our early start, we had to develop our own framework for implementing our Flash-based interface. I was involved in designing and guiding Process Author’s interface over the last few years and so felt the need to make sure Osellus’s foresight was recognized - at least in a blog posting :).

Other examples of companies waking up to the potential of Flex/Flash are Google and Salesforce.com which have been adding some Flash-based products and APIs to their catalogs.

Considering our strong enterprise focus as a company, I am especially peaked by the strong uptake of Salesforce.com’s Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex. Apex (Salesforce AppExchange) is of course Salesforce’s applications marketplace and one of the first implementations of the SaaS model.

On the consumer-internet front, Google made available the Google Talk Gadget a few months ago which is a Flash implementation of Google Talk that can be added onto your Google Personalized Homepage. The gadget can be even be added to a blog or webpage so visitors can chat with you right there in the context of your blog. Best of all, I noticed that it has the “Call” button - so you can VoIP with your google talk contacts right there - no need for the desktop client! I chatted up a couple of friends and was pretty impressed with the implementation. The gadget has a lot of other features too - like being able to play youtube videos and recognizing picasa albums.
The reason I highlight the Google Talk gadget in particular is that I was hard pressed to find a difference in the user experience between the gadget and the Google Talk desktop application. Of course this is as much as ode to the Google developers as to the Flash platform itself.

I suspect we will see Google employing Flash more and more in their upcoming “betas”.

Another web app that I am really impressed with is Virtual Ubiquity’s Buzzword. VU is calling it “the first real word processor for the web”. It’s written in Flex 2 for Flash 9 and is extremely sophisticated and rich in features.

These are but a few of the examples out there in the enterprise and web 2.0 arenas. All in all, this trend indicates the exciting albeit late recognition of a trend that Osellus had woken up to sometime ago.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing more and more of Flash/Flex and Silverlight based RIAs delivered either in the web browser or in an Apollo like delivery model in the next year or two. I itch to articulate my p.o.v. on the Flash vs. Ajax pseudo-debate that’s been on for the last couple of years but that’s a whole new post.

I am keen to know which other enterprise level products have Flash based interfaces, APIs or atleast components. If you know of any, let me know! I would also be interested in knowing about early adopters of Flash in the enterprise along with Osellus or even perhaps before us!

Last 5 posts by Rakesh Kamath

• But what about Jazz in MS Office? - October 29th, 2007
• That can't be too tough - October 28th, 2007
• Adobe and BEA announce partnership - September 12th, 2007
• Osellus blogs is changing gear - April 10th, 2007

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 6:22 am and is filed under Osellus, Products, The state of the art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.