The Adobe lab's abode

One of the more interesting developer tools' sites on the Web at the moment is the Adobe Labs project. If you haven't seen it before, the premise is to show developers what the Adobe team is working on and provide feedback to any works in progress so they can build better developer tools. It is similar to IBM's Alphaworks -- a top site for those on the bleeding edge.

The folks over at Adobe (Macromedia) Labs have been busy lately with the release of many interesting projects. Just some of the technology being recently released include Flash Player 9, the Flex Beta 3 release, the XMP Toolkit 4.0, and the announcement of project Apollo.

However, one smaller topic which caught my eye was the "Spry framework for AJAX". According to Adobe the Spry framework for AJAX "is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring Ajax to the web design community who can benefit from Ajax, but are not well served by other frameworks."

It looks like this framework could be incorporated into some of their existing tools and Adobe are currently seeking feedback on the project. Demos of the code in action can be found here.

The question many developers might ask is "Why do we need a framework for AJAX?" Well, maybe many of us won't need one but it can't hurt to give it a go and will be of particular interest to AJAX novices. Better still, the code has been released for free under the BSD licence so go and give it a whirl.

Thanks Adobe, we'll give it a shot.