Ajit posts on AJAX and mobile, and where he sees opportunities for it:

"Specifically, it solves the following problems in the mobile context.

a) The problem of market fragmentation

b) Porting woes (specific to downloading applications like those built on J2ME)

c) Application distribution without ‘walls’"

This may be the case; but it strikes me that comparing the reality of J2ME as deployed today to the promise of any future technology (whether it be Flash, AJAX, Python or whatever) isn't valid. There will be implementation differences in browsers supplied by multiple vendors; there will be differences in how they render components. There will be bugs, problems, misinterpretations of specs, shoddy implementations: all the things which have led J2ME to the state it is in today.

AJAX is interesting, but principally because it lets browsers do things that proper applications have been able to do for years. There's definitely value in this but as I notes at dConstruct last year, isn't it a bit strange that what excites folks about AJAX is the prospect of using it to produce application-like interfaces - when these interfaces are themselves based on metaphors that we've been working with for 20+ years now? Surely there's an opportunity here to do something new?

IMHO mobile AJAX will have its biggest impact on Macromedia: effectively it could be a more open way of letting all those web development guys get producing mobile applications, and as such it's directly competing with Flash.

Comments

[Jag]

I bet you don't get many comments on postings from over a year ago! But your last point was a good prediction in my opinion. But not because it intimates that Ajax provides competition for Flash. (Because I don't think it seriously does) No. But rather for the prediction that Macromedia (now Adobe of course) would do something about it. Apollo is it.