Massimo Foti, a freelance Web designer, Adobe Dreamweaver customer, and AJAX user, said Spry provides a reusable, flexible alternative to writing ad hoc routines to parse data stored in XML. Spry also emphasizes the dataset, Foti said.

"The first thing is that Spry put the dataset at the core of its architecture. It's the first AJAX framework that does this," Foti said in an e-mail.

The pre-release thus far lacks a widget framework; Adobe continues to work on an architecture for widgets.

Adobe does not see its Flash technology for Web applications as competitive with AJAX. "We see them as tools that leverage some of the same skills and provide different levels of functionality," said Todd Hay, director of platform marketing at Adobe.

The company is evaluating when it will offer Spry as a general release and will seek community feedback first. Adobe hopes eventually to monetize Spry by incorporating support for it into authoring tools such as Dreamweaver.