jSeamless: The Conspiracy

Okay, so this probably doesn’t par up to the JFK assassination, those crop circles, or how in the world John Locke can survive a bullet in the chest, but it’s starting to really bother me.

I developed jSeamless with the intent of “seamlessly” bringing technologies together to make life easier on the developer. However, I’m starting to realize that the people that make these technologies would rather not see this happen. I never considered that anyone could understand the concepts of what I’m trying to do and actually put in some extra effort to stop me. I figured at worst people would just not care and let it pass by without another look, but that’s not what seems to be happening.

First Point – Java.net

Now that jSeamless has become much more stable and has the majority of features necessary to release I thought java.net would be the place to go to get some good advertising. So I filled out a form requesting that jSeamless be featured along with an article I had written hoping to get some additional developer interest in the framework. After a couple weeks I e-mailed the editor and asked about it. The basic summation was that it would be a conflict of interest to post anything on their site about jSeamless since it directly competes with Swing because it uses Flash as the reference implementation. Now, I can understand if the purpose of jSeamless was to only do Flash development, but jSeamless is about abstraction and it just so happens the only currently completed implementation uses Flash content. I was told to send them another e-mail when there’s a completed Swing implementation…we’ll see how that goes.

Point Two – FlexCoders

I hang out on the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group to find answers to problems I’m having with Flex integration into jSeamless and to find out new extensions that are being written to Flex that I might be able to integrate or derive ideas from for jSeamless. I decided to post a message to the group asking for feedback from the Java developers that are also developing in Flex to get some ideas of what features they would look for in an API like jSeamless. I actually got some really good responses, I messaged back with additional information and then suddenly all the posts disappeared without a trace.

There was no e-mail letting me know I had violated some rule of the group or anything. I know the group is run primarily by people that work at Adobe, so I can only assume it had to do with marketing a framework that could take away revenue from their commercial products.

There actually several other scenarios that have had similar results, but I’m really starting to feel a lot of resistance for this system. I never imagined that I was developing something controversial or even something that would get anything worse than indifference about. This causes some problems since I was hoping to get some support from companies like Adobe or Sun in the long-run, but it would seem they don’t really want such a project to succeed.

I guess this doesn’t really classify as real conspiracy, but it bugs me so I figured I would share my annoyance with the world. 🙂