Foreword 1 We imagine a world where every digital interaction--whether in the classroom, the office, the living room, the airport, or the car--is a powerful, simple, efficient, and engaging experience. Flash Player is widely used to deliver these experiences and has evolved into a sophisticated platform across browsers, operating systems, and devices. One of the main forces driving Adobe's innovation and the development of the Flash Player is seeing where developers are pushing the edge of what's possible to imple- ment, and then enabling more developers to accomplish that kind of work. Taking the way-back machine to 2001, you would see the web being widely used and the early signs of web sites containing not only pages but also interactive applica- tions. These applications were primarily using HTML forms and relying on web serv- ers for processing the form information. A handful of leading edge developers were working to implement a more responsive interaction by taking advantage of client- side processing with ActionScript in Flash. One of the earliest examples of successful interactive applications was the hotel reservation system for the Broadmoor Hotel, which moved from a multi-page HTML form to a one-screen, highly interactive res- ervation interface that increased their online reservations by 89%. Clearly, responsiveness matters. It creates a much more effective, engaging experi- ence. However, in 2001, there was a lot to be desired in terms of performance, power of the scripting language, ease of debugging, and design constraints within browsers (which were created to view pages rather than host applications). We did a lot of brainstorming and talked extensively to developers and decided to embark on a mission to enable this trend, naming the category "Rich Internet Appli- cations" (RIAs). To better support RIAs, we aimed to create: · A tremendously faster virtual machine in Flash Player for ActionScript 3.0. · A development framework called Flex, making it radically easier to build RIAs. · An environment specifically to deliver rich Internet applications to their full potential, known now as the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). During the dot- com bust, we held onto the vision of enabling this future world of rich Internet applications. xv