How well Flex / Flash fit into the semantic web movement
First of all, check out the (or wait to ) freebase.com. It’ll fill the big void of the “web as platform” trend.
There was a good discussions at OReilly Radar, started out with their coverage on freebase. It’s about semantic web, which is Tim Berners-Lee’s Utopia web. Most of readers here love O’Reilly books. Just you know Tim O’Reilly is very actively preaching new technologies too.
One way or another we’re dealing with more and more likely semantic web. As Tim O’Reilly said:
The semantic web is definitely coming. But it’s coming through different mechanisms, I think, than the Semantic Web pioneers imagined.
However, a fundamental factor about semantic web is that the information is textual and verbose. And the information is published, exposed, linked, enriched and processed according a set of standards, showing below. All XML. The whole idea of semantic web is based on the HTML/XML web, at lease that’s what I’m seeing.
Now the questions are:
- How binary based Flex/Flash rich internet application platform fits into the apparently coming semantic web?
- How information presented through Flash can be discovered, processed, linked and republished via the same set of technologies?
- Should Adobe do something to come up with standards to support semantic web, or should hand over semantic Flash to certain standard organization such as W3C?
- If we are seriously making Flash a fundamental web platform for both information and application, sooner or later, those questions should be answered.
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I think what you are failing to recognize is that all of the layers you’ve displayed above in your diagram could be and (in real MVC architecture) should be mostly handled on the server, and exposed to the UI of your application via services of some sort. You could use Web Services, or XML over Http, or bump it up a notch and connect to Adobe Blaze DS or LiveCycle Data Services.
A Flex application should contain only as much business logic and other rules as necessary, but all of the “brains” of your application, as well as data live on the server.
The Semantic Web concept is all about data… computers talking the same language and allowing the crawl of that data across systems to happen programatically, not about the technology used to render the user interface. Right?
If you execute a Flex or Flash application the right way, you are simply going to be building out a great user experience on the front-end, while leveraging the real application behind the scenes… and that application can leverage semantic data concepts the same as any other.
The Blaze DS and LiveCycle Data Services are well suited to play a role in the “real” next generation of RIAs… where the data that will be able to be provided to users will fall in-line with the robustness of a Flash or Flex GUI.
-d