[thelist] Macromedia & "Rich Internet Applications"

[Tom Dell'Aringa]

--- John Dowdell <jdowdell at macromedia.com> wrote:
> Hi, there was quite a bit of discussion here about the Macromedia
> site this past week, so I figured you'd want to know that we've 
> got the first round of changes in, as well as an interim progress 
> report on feedback and changes. Here's info:
> http://www.macromedia.com/special/progress_report/

NOTE: This is a bit long, but I think its a worthwhile discussion. I
really want to hear what developers thing about this technology. Is
this something that we want to spend our time becoming a part of?
Will it benefit my career? I don't know...

John and All,

One thing that has struck me throughout this whole thing has been
MM's "Rich Internet Applications" theory and their touting of it. 

I can't help but think back to 1999-2000 in the dot.com heyday, where
buzzwords for products where being thrown around like crazy and this
sounds so much like that.

I've read through a bit of MM site explaining the idea. I've looked
at the examples they built, read about emerils.com and e-trade. In
the end, I'm failing to see what the big benefits here are vs. other
approaches - other than you use a MM suite of products so they get
the money intead.

MM states the benefits are (business managers):
- Increasing the Number of Successful End-User Transactions. As if
you couldn't do this otherwise with good design and architecture.

- Helping Your Online Business Get to Market Faster. I wan't to vomit
when I hear this nonsense. Wasn't this a lesson learned during the
bomb? Getting to market faster is not a competitive advantage.

- Keeping Your Application Development and Deployment Expenses Down
"Macromedia MX solutions easily integrate into your IT environment,
allowing you to leverage existing software assets. Macromedia MX
applications also help maximize your IT infrastructure investment by
reducing bandwidth usage and server load."

This is tech marketing speak. They don't easily integrate into my
environment if I have a staff of hand coders who don't want to use MM
products, and we have J2EE backend folks using WebSphere or some
other product.

 “Using the Macromedia MX family of products, deployment time at
Emerils.com has been reduced from 15-18 days to just five days,”
enthuses the Emerils developer team.
See how Emerils.com took advantage of Rich Internet Applications to
reduce developer costs while improving user experience.
 
"for IT organizations by:"

- Reducing IT Infrastructure Costs
Macromedia MX reduces your bandwidth usage and server load by moving
processing to the client—resulting in fewer server requests and
compressed data transfers.

Sure, this might be true - don't know how much money you would really
save. But you are transferring that one time (so they say) minimum
load to the user. Do they want to wait? Maybe..maybe not. Based on
what I saw with version 1 of Macromedia.com the answer is a
resounding NO, and it *wasn't* one load, it was over and over and
over...

- Streamlining Development
Macromedia MX helps you maximize the productivity of all your
developers—from novice to expert—through approachable tools,
pre-built templates and components, and rapid server- and client-side
scripting languages.

Blah blah blah my tools are better than yours blah blah blah.
Marketing not quantifiable.

- Supporting Industry Standards
Macromedia MX solutions provide native support for leading Internet
industry standards, reducing your business and development risks.

They must be joking... Sure they are trying and succeeding to a
point. But based on what we saw with the beta and what problems still
exist... this is hardly true.

"For users"

- Reducing Frustration Through an Interactive and Real-Time User
Experience
Macromedia MX rich-client applications reduce user dissatisfaction by
offering both increased interactivity and instant feedback.

Again based on their beta this seemed to be the opposite. There was
lots of user dissatifcation, and they removed much of that
functionality for beta2.

- Shortening the Learning Curve for New and Novice Users
Macromedia MX solutions offer a desktop-software level of
interactivity that translates complex data and business processes
into accessible applications for a wide range of users.

I really don't know about this. All I know was beta1 had a steep
curve and was difficult for even web developers to use.

-Saving Time With a Single Screen Interface
Rich Internet Applications reduce multiple steps into a single screen
interface, eliminating multiple page loads while offering users a
single application view.

But it loaded every time! It didn't always work right. It too *too
long*.

Then on the case study for Emerils they give us the solution as:

Solution 
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
Macromedia Flash MX 

So my "Rich Internet Application" solution is to use DW and Falsh. Be
serious. Looking at the Emerils site, I don't see anything
impressive.

This seems to me a lot of marketing speak, a lot of "buy our product"
type thing and a lot of hype. Where is the REAL benefit to me the
developer? Why should I push for this at my company? I don't see much
reason.

If this were such a great technology, wouldn't it be in use all over
the web? Or at least in some new significant places? The "pet store"
example was somewhat interesting, but nothing like that really exists
on the web - which seems to me so true of all these pitches. Nice
demos, no real reality.

Interested to hear all your thoughts...

Tom







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