Spry: Adobe in Reservoir Dogs Type Stand-Off
May 19th, 2006 "Spry":http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ oh why oh why? I am of course referring to Adobe's "recently released":http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html AJAX framework called Spry. See the problem I have with this is Adobe seem to be lining this up directly in comparison to Flex. After Adobe's recent adverts to "Go Beyond AJAX with Flex" they now seem to be hedging their bets by releasing their own framework in an arena with the other "135 other":http://ajaxian.com/archives/134-ajax-frameworks-and-counting frameworks (134 plus the "Google Web Toolkit":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html). There is now so much choice it's unreal and how many people are going to use Spry over Prototype, DOJO, JSON, Yahoo's web widgets and "all the others":http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Frameworks. The way I see it Adobe should be 110% behind making Flex 2 a success which is fairly unique in its industry (yes I know about "Laszlo":http://www.laszlosystems.com/ et al.) At the moment they are only diluting their position. The developer community is going to watch them plug each other while they go on hacking around with their favoured AJAX framework. This said, Spry actually looks quite good. It's very much based on loading then manipuling XML datasets and will feel very familar to Flex developers and using it's dynamic region markup does make a page quite readable and succient while other AJAX frameworks require much more effort to understand where the data is coming from and being manipulated. But why would I use it over Flex? In non-Flash based environments? Maybe but then i've got "Prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ and "Scriptaculous":http://script.aculo.us/for that. Instead what Adobe has done is sow doubt in my mind that they are not 100% sure Flex will suceed.....
4 Responses to “Spry: Adobe in Reservoir Dogs Type Stand-Off”
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May 19th, 2006 at 10:31 PM
Hi there.
My viewpoint is probably biased, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
First, my opinions. I think AJAX is really great for the web—it’s breathing new life into the whole web industry. And I don’t think that AJAX and Flex is an either/or proposition. There are times when adding AJAX functionality into an existing web page is going to yield the best results, there are times when you will want to mix the two technologies, and there will be times when creating a Flex application will completely blow away anything you can do with AJAX.
The way I think about it is that AJAX signals an important shift in how people create websites, and it is important that our HTML-based business (Dreamweaver, in particular) not lose sight of the changes happening in the industry.
For Dreamweaver customers, creating a well thought out, easy to use framework that works well with Dreamweaver ended up making more sense than supporting one of the 135 frameworks. That may change in the future, but that’s where the team’s head is at right now.
Meanwhile, the Flex team is going full throttle in closing out bugs, improving performance, getting launch plans in place, etc. I’m pleased at the uptake so far, and you’ll be seeing great things to come.
May 20th, 2006 at 01:14 PM
Stuart, I think that Adobe just trying to create tools for “threir people”, Flex developers, to make it easy to use Flex and AJAX at once. They’re not trying to conquer the world of AJAX frameworks.
BTW, your weblog is great, thank you!
May 22nd, 2006 at 09:01 AM
Thanks for your comments guys.
I don’t believe Flex and AJAX is an either/or proposition. Quite the opposite, the use cases for AJAX and Flex should be quite different. I see Flex as the major competition to producing Rich Client Applications for Enterprise Applications in direct competition to Java Swing. Its Data Charting and Enterprise Services put it right in this market and i’m sure this is where Adobe see it.
For those that think Java Swing applications are dead, thing again. There are hundreds of developers there in the financial sector producing Swing client applications for trading systems, ERP, CRM, SAP et al. And this is where Flex should be, its faster to develop, cleaner, lower-footprint and richer (in media terms).
I guess my problem is i’m not seeing this pitch from Adobe. I’m a J2EE consultant by trade and my peers either don’t know of Flex2 or have a negative impression of it.
On this basis I’m not interested in seeing Flex and AJAX used togethe, i think it’s a low case scenario (<20>
It will be good to see Spry integration in DreamWeaver to help bring AJAX to that consumer base. You are right, fitting a different framework in would have been hard, so kudos on that decision. I would like to see Adobe communicate the differentiator, the USP of Flex more effectively. To see it die of the comment “Well we could do that was AJAX” would be sad.
PS Thanks for the comment Michael. Made my day :-)
May 24th, 2006 at 06:27 PM
Hi Stuart, A couple points from the Spry team, if I may. First off, both the Flex team and the Spry team understand that we are targeting very different audiences.
Flex is positioned for creating enterprise applications based on the Flash platform and MXML. Spry is targeted towards web designers that are HTML-centric and want to enhance their existing sites with Spry’s capabilities. So it’s not so much diluting, but as Michael noted, it is providing solutions for target users.
We looked at the other frameworks in thinking about Ajax and the next version of Dreamweaver, but none of them fit our vision exactly. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but we wanted to create something that would work well for our users. We hope that Spry will do that and we have been pleased with the response so far.
None of this is bet hedging; it’s just us trying to innovate. We are confident that both products will be successful independently and together.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Donald Booth
Spry Team