JamJar is an Adobe project which I must admit passed me by. It has been on Labs since July 2006, and predates my interest in Flex.

This is an on-line collaborative “shared paper’ application developed by Adobe as a proof of concept. It works and is pretty neat. Anyone who has an Adobe ID can launch and use it from the labs page – no fee, but there are some Google Ads.

As the PDFs describe, it has had a long gestation (pre-dating the MacroMedia aquisition) and was ultimately developed using Flex 2. While the documents make reference to the “jamjar SDK”, and present a tutorial for creating a “Hello, World” widget, there is no indication if or when the SDK will actually be released.

This app is great as proof of concept which Flex developers may use themselves to whet the appetite their clients. However as it stands developers will find themselves building similar functionality from scratch. I think this is something of a wasted opportunity, reulting in a lot of re-inventing of the wheel. This application must be packed full of potential rich source material for Flex tutorials.

Reading between the lines, the team have a number of areas they’d like to develop further, but as it appears not to have been updated since July 2006, I am guessing the project has stalled? Perhaps it is time to OpenSource it? At the very least, publishing some of the design documents if not the actual source would be of value to anyone considering developing an application along similar lines. I guess there’s no point really in releasing the widget SDK unless the whole thing is going to be released as an installable application?