Rich Media patent hype - is AJAX safe?

Published by neil on February 24th, 2006

Despite the scare tactics flying around about diverse internet technologies such as Flash, AJAX, and Java that have just been bound by a patent recently issued to an obscure web development company - reason and sanity prevails here: Don’t panic.

I came across the story from Jeffrey Zeldman’s briefest of posts inaccurately entitled “Selling AJAX by the pound”, itself a response on clearly reading little more than the leader paragraph of this article at InformationWeek. The prospect of having to pay a license to some money-grabbing business just to provide some of the new user interface toys us developers are lately equipped with, is certainly an unnerving thought. But all is not quite as these scare-mongers would have us believe.

The article at InformationWeek is certainly worth a read. The patent was awarded on Valentine’s Day to the company owned by Macromedia’s (now Adobe of course) former VP of strategy, Neil Balthaser. Balthaser claims to have been working on the principle underlying online rich-media development and delivery systems since the late 90s, and has the history of such work in his pocket to fend off the inevitable patent challenges. Balthaser is clearly in this for the money however, as he has stated that he is more interested in selling the patent than enforcing it.

So does the patent mean, as it is being suggested, paying up to use AJAX?
The patent abstract states:

Rich-media applications are designed and created via the Internet. A host computer system, containing processes for creating rich-media applications, is accessed from a remote user computer system via an Internet connection. User account information and rich-media component specifications are uploaded via the established Internet connection for a specific user account. Rich-media applications are created, deleted, or modified in a user account via the established Internet connection. Rich-media components are added to, modified in, or deleted from scenes of a rich-media application based on information contained in user requests. After creation, the rich-media application is viewed or saved on the host computer system, or downloaded to the user computer system via the established Internet connection. In addition, the host process monitors the available computer and network resources and determines the particular component, scene, and application versions, if multiple versions exist, that most closely match the available resources.

In the need to understand the reality of the impact of this on the web development space - and my job - I thought I would take a few minutes out, take a deep breath and skip through the patent itself, available online here.

What this patent clearly describes is nothing more than the online creation and manipulation of rich-media applications, clearly particularly focused on Macromedia Flash and Director applications. Although Macromedia (cough, Adobe) own those two technologies, the patent clearly describes the process of allowing online access to an individual to create and manipulate Flash-style rich-media applications (sites) online, without the need for the purchase of the software packages themselves.
Macromedia of course made this concept possible with the Flash Remoting and the earlier Flash Server technologies. Balthaser clearly spotted an opportunity to exploit something Macromedia had missed: the securing of a patent on the means by which such technologies can be put to use.

Touché! says Balthaser.
Shit! says Adobe.

So how is this, as Zeldman puts it, selling AJAX by the pound? It isn’t - just Zeldman using a developer buzz-word to create a stir - and likely some extra traffic from web developers linking to him and ranting about AJAX being patented (oops!). Flash does connect to the server using the same javascript HTTPRequestObject call as any AJAX enabled online application. But it is not that process which the patent describes. Put simply, the patent describes the online creation of Rich-media; little more than the modern equivalent of the online “build your site in seconds” services offered by so many web space providers for years. Balthaser’s company provides just such a service, as it happens.

So we lowly web developers can sleep in our beds, relatively safe in the knowledge we will not have to pay someone else just to do what we’ve always done. We’re sleeping far more comfortably than Adobe (Macromedia) right now, I am sure.

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