Macromedia's SOA Vision

"Web services are a native element in most of the software we're building at Macromedia today, and Adam's vision of asynchronous, message-driven, scripted, dynamic runtime-modifiable systems is a pretty technical way of describing the architecture for applications that we're working to enable in Central, with our focus primarily on the client side user experience and building on all the ongoing innovation in the services infrastructure. Still a lot of progress to be made in the underpinnings, such as wide adoption of XML Query, XML message brokering, and XML repositories rather than just relational databases, but there's certainly a lot we can build on already with our applications just with the web service architecture as it exists today."
[Kevin Lynch]

If this is indeed true, it will be quite interesting to see what Macromedia does with the WS-* specifications...especially considering that the Flash player currently has no notion of identity (Central does provide some type of Context...possibly identity fits there, but that doesn't help "non-Central" based flash apps), no support for high end encryption algorthims, no concept of transactions (lack of exception handling for that matter could make working with transactions a pain). If they get all this stuff in, it will definately make the jump from 5.0 to MX pale in comparison.

In any case, Xml Query and Xml repositories are really cool, but I don't see what they have to do with creating WebServices (and hey, Flash doesn't even support XPath or Xslt...maybe they should put that in before XQuery ;-) )...