AIR, Flex, RIA

This is all over the news today, adobe has announced the Open Screen Project….

The Open Screen Project is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Specifically, this work will include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Castâ„¢ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Check out this short video from Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch that clearly explains what this initiative means for the Flash ecosystem

This is great news because it essentially means that we are slowly but steadily moving towards a world where we will be able to write applications once and run them everywhere.

For the past several months I have believed that there is not a lot of value for application developers and businesses to invest heavily into developing specific skills and specific applications for mobile devices as I believe that the runtimes and the environment will soon reach a point where there will be no special skill or special investment required for developing for the mobile. Almost all platforms, especially in the RIA space are moving in this direction … be it Sun’s JavaFx, Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adobe’s Flash Platform .. we are slowly heading towards developer bliss.