fplanque: IT world

It was bound to happen. Macromedia's (well, Adobe's) Flash player finally evolved into a very complete Virtual Machine. They call it Apollo.

It basically solves the same problem Java has tried to solve for years: write once, run anywhere.

Though it's certainly less mature than Java today, I see several factors that could let Apollo succeed where Java has failed. Among these:

• It leverages existing developers skills (HTML, Javascript, Flash...) which makes it look much more accessible than Java which only leveraged C++ skills.
• It's gonna look nice out of the box. Java still looks relatively ugly...
• With today's computers it's probably going to feel less painful and slow than Java back in 1996...

On the other hand, Sun has recently released Java as Open Source and that's certainly not a coincidence. I'm not sure what Adobe's pricing/distribution plans are with Apollo, but it certainly ain't gonna be as free as open source!

This is one of those examples where a picture is worth a thousand words!

Got that from Cedric Giorgi who also points to this PDF from Gartner explaining what the hype cycle is about.

Now, the interesting part is comparing the 2006 hype cycle with 2005 hype cycle.

I can't help but wonder:

• Where the hell did Podcasting go this year? Massive adoption already? You could say that for RSS, but not for podcast. Has it fallen so deep into the out of sight lows that even Gartner did not see it this year?
• Why did the "semantic web" become the "corporate semantic web"?
• Are Tablet PCs going to stay at the bottom of the trough of disillusionment forever? (I would say yes!)
• What happened to the internet micro payments? Gone forever?

Well, I guess the answers may well be in the full report, which you gotta pay big bucks for.

Sometimes I wonder if Macromedia isn't going to succeed with Flash where Java failed... on this particular topic of harware and OS abstraction. Flash Lite makes their virtual machine (aka "player") more real than ever. Russ has all the details so I won't even try to repeat them here!