I went to FlexCamp Boston yesterday. It was for Flash developers (which I’m not), with lots of code examples and live shots of dev tools. It was a good way to get immersed in what Adobe’s doing.

I think Flash is extremely interesting — it’s got a chance to attain the client-side, interactive, Web-component vision that Java never seemed to reach. Flash has succeeded, in part, because of great vector graphics and video support. Also, unlike Java, Flash came under Microsoft’s radar. By the time Flash became effectively ubiquitous, it was too late for Redmond.

The new Flash 9 Player puts Flash squarely on par with Java (technology-wise), with a high-performance JIT VM (AVM2), a real programming language (ActionScript), and a mature tool set.

Adobe’s working further up the stack (e.g. Flex, LifeCycle Data Services, ColdFusion, etc.), but the server-side technologies seem much less relevant. Adobe’s clearly trying to monetize the Flash franchise (in part) through server-side tie-ins, but there’s tough competition there from open source offerings. Of the examples I saw and developers I talked to, most “rolled their own”, using low-level protocols to connect to a simple, custom server-side infrastructure. Plus, a $20k single CPU license will be a hard sell, when the underlying hardware only costs $4k (or $100/month).

Bottom line: I think we’re going to see Flash used more and more. If you’re working on a project with a high-interactivity component, you should take a look.