WebOrb for Rails, a server-side technology - installed as a Rails plug-in - enabling connectivity between Flex and Flash Remoting clients and Ruby on Rails applications, has caught the interest of many. So much so that in blogs developers are wondering why the company behind it, Midnight Coders, isn't being snapped up by Adobe for its ability to show that Flex/Flash/Apollo can support remote objects for multiple backends...including .NET.

"Has Adobe given any thought to hiring these developers so they could get these implementations ported into Adobe’s Flex Data Services?" asks one poster, on the Flexcoders list.

Another writes:

"Adobe is trying to keep the price of their java/flash remoting server high. Which is understandable. They need to make money on the product or we'll all be out of jobs. (Well I would be anyway.) But if Adobe were to aquire WebOrb how much do you think the .NET version would be? Would the ROR and PHP versions be GPL?"

WebOrb isn't a direct competitor to Flex Data Services since it doesn't support Java. "Why isn't WebOrb all over the [Adobe] dev center?" asks this second poster. "Why isn't Adobe pushing it?"

Adobe is a sponsor of the the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose, so there doesn't seem to be any difficulty there. So observers are speculating that it must be the fact that Adobe-Microsoft interop is in some way contrary to Adobe's overall strategy that's the issue.

Now that you can develop all of your apps in a browser, the "OS Wars" are arguably far less relevant, but even so Flash - which is specifically designed for Internet use, for Internet applications, which is very different from an operating system - might well be keeping Microsoft from sleeping soundly at night.

.NET Developer's Journal News Desk will keep you posted!