Will Adobe’s Apollo Project Land Flash on Trading Floor Desktops? | September 19, 2006
by Byron Binkley
The last time I walked around a trading floor, the data displays were dismally behind the times. In an era where real time networked first person shooter games run at breakneck speeds on a $500 Dell box, why does it appear that so little attention has been paid to building dense data displays and custom dashboards for the financial pros who have a critical need for data absorption and comprehension?
Flash is the clear choice for building custom, interactive displays for all kinds of data. But you don’t see many hedge funds and trading desks posting jobs for Flash engineers. Why not? Why aren’t CDS traders tweaking curves by clicking and dragging points and then hitting a button to get new risk during the day? Why aren’t there more ActionScript jobs on Wall Street paying upwards of $150k like there are for good programmers with a handle on Bloomberg APIs?
The issue, I think, is that Flash isn’t on the desktop. If it was brain-dead easy to get data into and out of Flash so that it could integrate with the rest of the desktop, there would be 1,000 new jobs for ActionScript programmers overnight.
Along comes Apollo bearing the promise of getting Flash onto the desktop in early 2007. I spent some time reading about Flex and how Flash will enable the development of RIAs that work on and offline. Sounds very cool except that Flash, despite living on the desktop in Apollo, still isn’t going to be easy to integrate with the rest of the desktop. Clearly there’s value for the RIAs, but what about using a great technology for what it was designed to do best: interactive and custom UIs? Here was probably the best argument I read stating why Apollo won’t win the desktop for business applications (taken from an otherwise positive review of Flex):
One of the obstacles to the use of Flash, beyond multimedia effects, is that the Flash IDE (integrated development environment) is designer-focused. You have to understand its Timeline, a critical element in creating movies and animations, but unfamiliar to Visual Basic or Java developers.
Flash came from the perspective of animations and animators and is stretching to be an application development environment with a paradigm that isn’t particularly programming friendly. If you learn Java, C#, Matlab, or VBA you learn an environment that translates to any other “programming” environment. But Flash presents a whole new way of doing things. It doesn’t have a sufficiently low switching cost for other desktop application builders to just switch over. (Look at the migration to C# from Java on the other hand for contrast in Windows desktop development.)
To get entrenched in the desktop, Flash needs to be a part of a universe of complementary technologies, not the center of that universe. The people who write applications today aren’t going to switch to ActionScript, and it’s unlikely that the Flash developer community is going to take over all situational and composite application development. If by some miracle all relevant application needs move to the server in neatly packaged services in the next year, maybe there won’t be a need to tie into existing systems and technologies. But I think the territory behind the firewall is still critical in the business battleground, and Excel and VBA have the stronghold.
You know what would be really cool? If Microsoft and Adobe put aside their megalomania to make a friendly bridge between Flash, Excel, and VBA. Then end users could mix and match the technologies, leaning on each one for what it’s best suited to do. They could pull in some data from a database with VBA, get real time data in Excel from Bloomberg, then display it in an interactive, slick looking Flash component (designed down to the color by a designer, not a engineer – no offense to the rare few who were just addressed twice) that can feed data back to the spreadsheet. I sense a conflict of interest that’s going nowhere fast.
So – low hopes for Apollo shaking the trading floors anytime soon. But Apollo is a promising move to the desktop for Flash that will undoubtedly lead to some very cool RIAs nonetheless.
