Macromedia launches Flex Builder
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Macromedia this week will ship Flex Builder, which is designed to provide an interactive development environment for the companyâs Flex presentation server.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems and Adobe Systems are partnering on rich Internet application development in an arrangement incorporating both SOA and Web 2.0 concepts. The deal is being announced Tuesday at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference. BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder 2 software with the BEA Workshop Studio Java development environment. Through this bundling, developers can build cross-platform rich Internet applications that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure. Enterprise mashups also can result. "[The agreement] gives our developers access to the most innovative, rich Internet application platform," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop business unit. In the second part of the announcement, Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of the BEA WebLogic Server Java application server with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite software for building customer engagement applications. Combining Flex Builder and Workshop Studio is intended to give developers a workflow for building applications like interactive dashboards, customer and employee self-service applications, and business-to-business systems, BEA said. Applications are deployed using the Adobe Flash Player runtime. BEA's Workshop Bundle includes Flex Builder 2, Adobe's Eclipse-based IDE, and the Adobe Flex SDK, which is slated to be released under the open-source Mozilla Public License. The bundle is to enable developers to add rich interactivity to enterprise applications. While Workshop already features an SDK and IDE, Roth insisted there was no redundancy. Both Adobe and BEA have built on the Eclipse platform. "That allows both Workshop and Flex Builder to exist in one IDE." Roth said. "Eclipse provides the basic IDE framework. Workshop and Flex fill it out." Rich Internet applications developed with Workshop and Flex can be integrated with other BEA products, such as offerings from the WebLogic and AquaLogic families. This provides enterprise benefits pertinent to Web 2.0 and SOA, BEA said. Applications can be deployed using the planned Adobe Integrate Runtime technology for extending rich Internet applications to the desktop. "The Web 2.0 angle is, I think, really where Flex is really strong in allowing a more focused user interface and allowing a richer environment," Roth said. "Web 2.0 is about collaboration," and interacting with the customer, he added. For SOA, Adobe's architecture offers the notion of presentation services as well a framework for Flex applications to integrate with standard enterprise Java applications and SOA, Roth said. BEA's endorsement of Flex does not necessarily mean the company is choosing it over the popular AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technique for Web development. "In fact, we view both AJAX and Flex as being important rich Internet options, and our customers are looking for that," Roth said. "We found that segments of the customer base that are more developer-centric have a preference for AJAX while those who are more concerned with the interaction and have fairly significant interaction needs in terms of flexibility and creativity tend to go with Flex," especially in an enterprise context, he said. AJAX leverages HTML and JavaScript while Flex runs in the Flash Player, extends the browser, and has capabilities around graphics rendering, animation, and client code performance, said Adobe's Phil Costa, director of product management for Adobe Flex and ColdFusion. The Flex programming model focuses on data-driven applications as opposed to HTML, which was developed primarily around a documents paradigm, Costa said. Workshop bundled with Flex Builder 2 is due to be available by the end of the year with pricing starting at $899 retail. Also under the agreement, customers can deploy LiveCycle ES applications that leverage characteristics of WebLogic Server including Java Message Service to support business events, clustering and failover. Web services interoperability technologies are supported such as WS-I Basic Profile 1.1. While LiveCycle has worked with WebLogic Server before, users with this announcement will be provided with turnkey infrastructure for enterprise deployments. LiveCycle with WebLogic Server will available as a turnkey product early in 2008.
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Jim Plush has posted an offifical release announcement about his latest contribution to the PHP community - a debugging tool combining PHP (through the myBIC framework) and the Firefox FireBug extension.   I put together a couple pieces of technology to give the PHP community a debugger/profiler that should make life easier in the "web2.0" world. Are you tired of echo'ing print statements in your ajax calls? Writing to log files? Firing up big ol debuggers just to see what the value of some array is? Well look no further than the new MyBic PHP Debugger.   The tool is a smaller part of his larger MyBIC framework and can do things like writing log files, echo information back out to the screen, and communicate information back out to the Firefox user. There is a standalone version of FireBug that will be posted for those that don't want to have to install an entire framework to use it.   Keep an eye out (here and on his blog) for the links to the release when it's posted. In the meantime, you can check out a screencast [mov] of the package in action or just the screenshots in the blog entry.
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(InfoWorld) - Adobe's ColdFusion software for building Internet applications and Web sites is being improved with Microsoft .Net support, enabling .Net objects to be invoked from within the ColdFusion language. A public beta of ColdFusion 8, accessible here, is to be offered on Wednesday. The general release is set for mid-year. Version 8 is the first Adobe-branded release of the former Macromedia technology. ColdFusion is a server-side Java application; it is partnered with a markup language for writing ColdFusion applications. .Net support in the upcoming version 8 bridges the Java and Microsoft worlds. "Customers don't need to select one technology to the exclusion of the other," Tim Buntel, Adobe senior product marketing manager, said. Also featured in ColdFusion 8 is generation of PDF documents as well as capabilities for working with PDF forms and manipulating existing PDF documents. Support for the JBoss application server has been added, also. For developers, Adobe is adding interactive debugging based on the Eclipse IDE. A Server Monitor capability, meanwhile, identifies bottlenecks in the server. Adobe's Flex rich Internet application technology and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components are leveraged in the new product for integration of complex environments with intuitive interfaces, Adobe said. ColdFusion differs from Flex in that Flex is a client-side technology featuring a language and compiler to convert code to Flash content. With ColdFusion, the server-side technology can integrate with databases and Java and .Net objects while also offering text searching. However, ColdFusion also can generate an HTML interface for Web applications. The ColdFusion upgrade puts to rest questions about Adobe's commitment to the technology after acquiring Macromedia, said analyst Ray Valdes, research director for Internet platforms and Web services at Gartner.Â  "People may have wondered if Adobe appreciated ColdFusion, and I think they do. I think it's part of their enterprise software strategy," Valdes said. While Adobe recently offered the Flex software development kit to the community at large via open source, there are no plans to open-source ColdFusion. This stance gives the company the ability to make certain ColdFusion integrates with other Adobe technologies, Buntel said.
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TechWeb - Macromedia and Nokia sign a partnership that pumps Macromedia's efforts to convince developers to use its Flash technology in building mobile-phone apps.
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InfoWorld - Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is launching CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions.
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OPEN SOURCE champion, Microsoft has released the code for its FlexWiki, under an open source licence. FlexWiki, which is a Web-based user collaboration and content management program, is the third that Vole has released under an open source licence.
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A few days after Microsoft released its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in, Adobe Systems has begun to disclose new features in its upcoming Flash Media Server 3. Many observers see Silverlight as being positioned as a major competitor to Flash and Adobe&#39;s other media technologies.
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David Pogue explores the time-saving qualities of macro software.
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In a new post to his blog today, Mike Potter talks about the WebORB for PHP software and a new feature based on Adobe technology - a Flex-based console.   [It] includes a service browser, as well as a number of useful examples, showing both the client side code (in Flex) and server side code in PHP. The getting started guide (again, built into the console or available on the web) provides a good tutorial for creating your first WebORB powered application.   He likes the project overall, but notes a small issue he has with starting a new project - a prompt to use the Flex Data Services. Overall, though, he has high hopes for the future of the project.
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At least someone likes Eclipseâ¦ Interview Along with Scott Guthrie, Mark Anders was one of the fathers of ASP.NET. Then he led the Flex Builder team at Macromedia. Now at Adobe, heâs in charge of making Flash a development platform for rich Internet applications.â¦
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In this new blog post, Mike Potter points out two examples of the AMFPHP package in action as provided by Renaun Erickson.   The source code to both examples is available as well.  (You did know that Flex applications have the option of publishing the source code right? [...] To publish the source code for your own application, in Flex Builder select Project -> Publish Application Source...)   He also mentions an upcoming update to the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe to include some of these sorts of examples. Check out the mailing list for more.
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Apollo runtime is dubbed 'Adobe AIR' and due for testing along with Flex update.
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Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly dubbed Apollo, paves the way for Web applications that perform like desktop-bound programs.Images: Building apps on AIR
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Blog: Adobe announced its intention to open-source Flex several weeks ago, but didn't reveal why.  In this interview, Adobe's Phil Costa takes us through the reasons the company had for open-sourcing Flex.
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Capitalizing on the rapid adoption of its Flex presentation server, Macromedia Inc. is rolling out a new integrated development environment for the platform based on the popular Dreamweaver Web site tool.
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Macromedia plans to release on Monday the first major extension for Flex, server software introduced earlier this year as part of a drive to expand use of the company&#39;s Flash format.