Guest Post by Jeremy Allaire

I was bummed to read Dave Winer’s comments about Macromedia’s position vis a vis “BigCo’s”. The two primary issues - the mass community of scripting-level developers, and Macromedia’s efforts around web services interoperability - actually underscore a philosophy that I think is shared by Macromedia and Dave, and which is actually quite the opposite of BigCo-obsessing.

The point about scripting-level developers is simple: the vast majority of people building web applications are using scripting languages, not big enterprise architectures; a huge number are using VBScript/Jscript in ASP; lots of use ColdFusion; tons use PHP, some Perl, some Python, and on and on. This is a good thing. Scripting is pragmatic and cost-effective. Our mission with MX is to empower these people. I’m not sure how this is paying homage to BigCo’s.

The second item, on my comments on working with Microsoft on web services interoperability was merely a matter of fact. Yes, people (unfortunately) equate web services with .NET, and its important as a vendor to convey support for the same standards Microsoft is supporting.

However, it’s also worth noting that Microsoft has been incredibly active and supportive of efforts to drive interoperability, along with dozens of others in the community.

The related comment was about our approach here, which is decidely not BigCo - we’ve been actively contributing to the Apache Axis project, an open source platform for web services. We’re working with the community at large to help make this all a reality.

posted by Jeremy Allaire