As most of you might already know, Adobe released Flash 10 beta (code named Astro) version some days back. Its available for the developers and early testers to play around at Adobe labs.
I am not a flash developer nor do I work with any of the other Adobe technologies (Apollo, AIR,...). However one key feature of the Flash 10 release caught my eye among a host of other features. Flash Player 10 supports peer to peer communication, and that opens up a host of possibilities for the kind of applications that we can expect. This release supports a new protocol called RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) which provides inherent P2P support for the flash applications. I can imagine all sorts of rich applications like games, chat applications, fil sharing and other multimedia applications that can exploit this new feature. It's most likely that Adobe is integrating much more functionality into Flash like say VoIP, with P2P providing the base infrastructure. Else I wonder what a VoIP and IETF guy like Henry Sinnreich is upto at Adobe?
However as one reads deeper into the P2P details in the release, one can say that the peer-to-peer communication is sort of supported in a hybrid way. The whole P2P infrastructure will be managed by a future Adobe Flash Media Server technology and the details about the server availability is not yet known. The underlying protocol used is UDP, which was probably chosen for NAT traversal and for it's relative low-latency for multimedia streaming. All the Flash applications sort of register with Adobe Flash Media Server and then the Media Server links up the interested flash applications that want to interact and also conveys the respective IP network addresses. And then gets out of the way. The respective flash applications then talk to each other directly and exchange information. This is sort of hybrid pseudo-P2P mechanism that's employed by the likes of Skype. RTMFP seems to be a proprietary protocol as of now and the inherent P2P infrastructure is unlike the self-healing, self-discovering, scalable and distributed overlay P2P framework of other P2P applications like the file sharing apps. Further Adobe is saying that Flash P2P can not be used for massive file-sharing purposes. But I guess, that should not prohibit primitive file sharing apps to be using Flash 10. One of the advantages that flash has over any p2p overlay is that it has a large deployment since its claimed that almost 95% of machines have the flash installed.
Oh that reminds me of yet another exciting feature of this new release. Flash 10 allows native file access so users can read and save the files back to native file system.
For some more exciting discussions and comments,
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