Monday’s keynote was interesting, but if you ask most people that were there to give you a rundown, they’ll probably only be able to tell you one thing: Flash support for the iPhone is finally here. I can confidently say that I am one of those people, but from a general perspective, I found it interesting that it was Adobe’s end-of-keynote, anticipation building, biggest announcement of the conference. The one that got the throne wasn’t the new CFBuilder for ColdFusion development with Eclipse; not the Beta 2 releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder/Flex 4 (which were originally supposed to go to full release this MAX and instead got delayed to 2010), or even the announcement of Flash version 10.1. Nope, the big announcement was Flash on the iPhone. Adobe even created a 4-minute video skit to play at MAX as a precursor to the announcement. In case you missed it, here’s what we saw right before finding out the big news:

I had lunch right after the keynote on Monday with several community leaders and people from Adobe. I thought it was interesting that the folks from Adobe were surprised – almost to the point of being appalled – by the fact that none of the community leaders that attended the lunch even cared about the announcement that RIM (i.e. Blackberry) had joined the Open Screen Project and now fully supported Flash. The only thing that was being discussed on the subject of mobile was Flash for the iPhone.

A number of sessions were also included in this year’s MAX session schedule that were focused entirely around developing for the iPhone. I attended one of those sessions, and considering how skeptical I was going into it, I was seriously impressed by what I saw. The graphics acceleration looked incredible, and the 3D objects moved quickly and fluidly around the screen.

Multi-touch with the iPhone's Flash Player was impressively smooth even on a 2nd generation iPod

I was quite impressed by the full-fledged multi-touch capabilities and how smooth and responsive the demonstration Flash applications were to the various gestures. Even graphically intensive applications were impressively responsive to multi-touch and gestures, even on a 2nd-generation iPod (above).

Here’s a video of one of these sessions, entitled “Building Applications for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5″ :

Overall, considering the response and the buzz that this one announcement generated, to say that there are a lot of eager Flash developers ready to learn this new iPhone Flash SDK would be an understatement.

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IBM developerWorks recently published a new article that I wrote, titled Use the best open source client-side framework for cloud computing. The article ultimately takes Flex and OpenLaszlo and puts them head-to-head against each other.

Why Flex and OpenLaszlo?

Flex is clearly the market dominator for RIA applications, and though OpenLaszlo may have a lot of catching up to do, its arguably the next best thing. In the article I do my best to make a fair and unbiased comparison, and someone even noted that I did not discuss the advantage of AMF that Flash has for data transfer. With that said, yes, it is slightly weighted to facilitate open-mindedness toward RIA and the fact that there is a legitimate competitor to Flex.

Why not Silverlight or JavaFX?

Silverlight is licensed under the tight, grubby fingers of Microsoft, who isn’t much of an advocate for open source. Not to mention the fact that although it is good with video, that’s about it… even most MS developers are not even bothering with Silverlight when it comes to RIA. Sun on the other hand, is undoubtedly an advocate of open source, but JavaFX is so immature that Sun isn’t even ready to release it as an open source product.

Can OpenLaszlo reasonably be compared to Flex?

Laszlo Systems doesn’t have the marketing dollars and community following that Adobe does, nor does it have 25 years of industry credibility behind it, so it is no surprise that there isn’t a very large community of RIA developers supporting LZX. However, one could logically assert that OpenLaszlo is “the little engine that could” to RIA, and there is only one reason I would give it such credit. The goal of LZX – the declarative syntax that is used with OpenLaszlo – is to have the capability of compiling to any format for the web. Being that it is unlikely Microsoft will release the Silverlight compiler to the open source community, that leaves us with DHTML and SWF. Of course, DHTML isn’t exactly “compiled”. Instead, OpenLaszlo generates the necessary DHTML from your LZX code for publishing to the web. The fact that it can do that AND compile to the native SWF format to run from the Flash Virtual Machine is impressive in and of itself and deserves some street cred at the least.

If you’re interested in learning more about OpenLaszlo, including how to code it, it’s history, and how it stands up against Flex, CLICK HERE to be taken to the article on the IBM developerWorks site.

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