Some of you may have seen intelisea’s web site. Basically it’s a demo of an installed system which is used on luxury yatchs. Having downloaded the demo (I suggest you do the same) and tried it out, I contacted Phil Heinz (their Director of Systems Development - phew, that’s a big title Phil) and he confirmed :

“The demo you see now on the site is Flash 8. The actual product that will be installed 1st qtr 07 is made completely in Flex 2. The product, like the prototype, connects via XMLSocket to a VB.NET module for hardware interface. Video is consumed via RTMP connection to FMS2. There are over 200 data points coming in from around the ship (all 30-50m ships). There are 4 cameras now with a max of 20. In addition to monitoring ship systems, InteliSea will also control lights, AC, power bus switching, etc…”

Let me tell you, it does just about everything on the ship but wipe your ass (seriously, download the demo). It’s a very impressive implementation of Adobe products. Not because it’s groundbreaking (though it is), but because it, like all really great ideas or great tools, is a mash-up of many well known tools, brought together in a new combination to comprehensively do a set of tasks for a given environment.

I worked for a companya while ago who were creating just such a massive RIA for another specific environment. Their vision was the same, to use a multitude of Adobe front and backend data and multimedia tools (Flash, Flex, FMS, etc - plus some C#). I was excited and so were the other developers. We did some excellent work and some truly rich IA work in AS 2.0, but as with so many of these great visions, petty, beaurocratic, selfserving, ignorant, buzz-word happy, maniacle, little empire builders get in the middle and f&*k things up because they don’t see the vision or understand the technology and suddenly you’re trying to deliver a massive RIA in AJAX or probably in Web 2.0 by now ;) LOL. Intelisea clearly did not have that problem and held true to their vision and it shows. But I digress. Go check out the site, Phil’s team have done an excellent job.

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