As of today, Adobe has removed all license restrictions on the use of the Flash SWF and FLV/F4V formats, as well as the AMF protocol. This is exciting news, since it means that more folks can get into the business of building Flash playback devices and systems that can talk directly to Flash. This may be a particular boon for F/OSS projects like gnash.

Of course, there are some real questions about how this will play out. Adobe is still in control of the formats in question; they haven’t announced plans to open the specification process to the public (at least not that I’ve seen). While Adobe pledged to keep the open standards up-to-date, failing to include a process for including community contribution increases the chance of forking the standard. And that dilution of Flash was the supposed reason for the very license restrictions that were lifted today.

In any case, I see this as a step in the right direction. Any Internettechnology wide-spread enough to be considered an de facto standard should be based on open standards. I applaud the efforts of Adobe in at least attempting to strike a balance.

Adobe has released version 1.0 of Adobe AIR as well as the Flex 3.0 platform. I got a chance to work with betas pf AIR and Flex 3.0 on an engagement at MatchMine, and I’ve been looking forward to the final releases for a while.

AIR is a new runtime for building cross-platform desktop applications, based on the excellent WebKit browser engine (which also powers Apple’s Safari browser and the was derived from the open source KHTML engine). AIR allows development of desktop applications using the similar tools and techniques to Web application development: Flash, Flex, and HTML + AJAX. This means that Web developers can transition their existing skills to the world of desktop applications.

Flex is (or rather was, with the release of AIR) a Web application platform based on the browser-based Flash VM. It’s still based on Flash, but the 3.0 release can deploy applications to the AIR runtime as well, meaning that Flex plays in both the Web and desktop domains. 3.0 is an evolution of the 2.0 platform, rather than the huge server seen going for 1.x to 2.0, but the latest release is more mature and capable than it’s predecessor.

Adobe has also taken steps to move the Flex SDK, then free version of the Flex development to tools, to an open source model. Most of the core components are open source now, but there’s still a pretty hefty package of Adobe “add-ons” which are still closed (including the sources for the AIR SDK components). Still, this is a nice first step towards a more open set of tools for the Flash family. More info can be found at the Adobe Open Source site.

Beyond open source, Adobe is providing a wide range of tools for building AIR apps. You can use Flash, Flex Builder, or Dreamweaver to produce AIR applications. There also support for HTML +AJAX development in Aptana Studio. Or you can forgo the Adobe GUI tools and break out your favorite text editor to build apps with the Flex SDK or AIR SDK. The latter is included in the former. These freeware command-line based toolsets provide the bare bones tools needed to build, test and package AIR apps using whichever of the technologies it supports. The AIR SDK is focused on HTML+AJAX apps and the Flex SDK does it all. There’s support for ant as a build tool, which is a nice touch.

One of the most interesting things about AIR and other platforms like it is the explicit support for desktop applications. A couple of years ago, the question seemed to be when the Web would kill the desktop and the traditional OSes. A more rational pattern seems to be returning to the fore and folks are starting to realize that it’s not a question of Web apps OR Desktop apps, but rather an exciting melange of both. There’s a place for both and each type of application fits a certain domain of problems better than the other. And the place where things get really exciting is that area where they meet. Adobe AIR is an interesting take on building desktop apps that can easily leverage the power of the Web, too.