According to news.com, and confirmed by Adobe bloggers Daniel Dura and Christian Cantrell, FLEX 2 will ship with a free SDK, including the FLEX frameworks and a compiler. This is a huge deal. You can now build and release commercial FLEX applications for free, you only pay if you want to use Adobe's IDE.

21 packages, 188 classes, 20,000 lines of code
Automatic unit testing , Automatic daily builds,

Does this sound like a Flash program to you? Because it is.

The new Yahoo! maps (released just over an hour ago) is amazing. The app is very smooth and slick, and makes heavy use of yahoo yellow-pages data. It's integrated with real-time traffic info as well. The experience of dragging and dropping the map, and zooming in and out, is _nearly_ as smooth as google maps (hey for day one that is terrific. There's lots of room for optimization with this kind of code).

Yahoo! is playing the fast follower game, and playing it well (see also an earlier post on the new Yahoo! email client). And they're obviously thinking hard about using the right technology for the right job, rather than simply copying the google approach.

Allurent just emerged out of stealth mode today. Their product? An RIA shopping cart for ecommerce stores. They seem to be doing their development in FLEX.

Amit Ranjan (the head of Uzanto's India operations) has a great post describing the Macromedia MAX conference in Delhi (a conference I went to last year).

The conference happened mere weeks before the announced merger with Adobe. His report gives insight into the spirit of Macromedia immediately pre-merger, describing a marketing/technical team with "a swagger in their walk", feeling they have the potential to be the "Microsoft of the web". Pride goes before the fall, boys!

A new web email client (with the unfortunate name of goowy) has just hit public beta. Regular readers of jonathanboutelle.com will know that this kind of thing is right up my alley. The movement of desktop applications to the web is one of the big trends in rich internet applications right now, and email clients are leading the way (think gmail, earthlink, and oddpost).

Geeks spend a lot of time talking about what's possible with a particular technology. We pride ourselves in being able to wring every drop of interactivity out of a platform, of doing things with the tools that the toolmakers never would have thought possible. As a result, any argument about software platforms often falls into the following pattern: Detractor of Platform A will say something like "you can't do drag and drop in Platform A". Supporter of Platform A will respond that you can so drag and drop in Platform A, and will post the code to prove it. Score one for the supporter: the detractor simply wasn't able to use the tool.

First A Little History
Rich Internet Applications are widely believed to be the new paradigm for application development. This is the most exciting thing since all the desktop applications had to be ported over to the web 5 years ago. THAT was the most exciting thing since all the client server applications were ported to the desktop 10 years ago. The technology industry reverses its opinion about whether computing power should be centralized or distributed every five years or so, seemingly as regular as the tides or the seasons.

RIA development is a funny thing. A smarter client means that your server code is no longer all about handling display logic. Instead, you're in charge of feeding data (typically XML documents) to the client whenever it asks for some, and handling any database updates (typically XML documents again) that might be needed.