Coghead moves UI over to Adobe Flex
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Coghead took a giant step toward taking Web 2.0 application development mainstream with the announcement today of Coghead version 2.0 which will use Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud) hosting service and incorporate the Adobe Flex development environment into its infrastructure.The target market for Coghead's 100 percent Web-based development environment are knowledge workers, rather than programmers, and the 50 million businesses that don't have a server, said Paul McNamara, Coghead CEO.Using Flex will give those knowledge workers a bigger library of widgets to use in order to create forms and at the same time enlarge the community of developers who can write applications using Coghead."We are trying to expand the range of people who can create business applications from simple applications created by moderately technical people all the way up to professional programmers," said McNamara.Version 2.0 is three times faster than the original version released in April 2007, according to McNamara, thanks mainly to performance enhancements using Adobe Flex."The Flex packet size is compact and efficient between server and desktop," said McNamara.The other major highlight of version 2.0 is the deal with Amazon to use its EC2 hosting environment, which will give users assurance that their data and application definitions are safely stored in the Amazon cloud.In addition, McNamara said that creating Web services on Amazon's platform has always be a daunting task, and by putting Coghead on top of EC2, Amazon will also extend its market to less technical developers.In coming news, Coghead is also working to adopt Adobe AIR, formerly code named Apollo, onto its platform. AIR gives users the ability to work with Web 2.0 applications offline and will cut down on the initial load of an application.Coghead Version 2.0 is available now.
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In an announcement late Tuesday, Adobe said it is promoting its current senior vice president and chief software architect, Kevin Lynch, to what appears to be a new post with higher level of seniority.
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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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(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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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 and expectations the company had for open sourcing Flex.
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Adobe's AIR allows applications to bridge the Web and desktop.
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Macromedia is heading in a new direction with the launch of a development tool for Flex, its development platform for rich internet applications (RIAs).
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With the release of its first suite of Web and graphic design software expected to be delivered at some point in the upcoming months, Microsoft is gearing up to go head-to-head with graphics leader Adobe Systems.
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New service lets Adobe customers transmit documents for commercial production.
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Yahoo said yesterday it struck a deal with Adobe Systems to distribute the Yahoo Search toolbar with Adobe software. The pact calls for Adobe Reader, the free software used to read PDF files, to include a Yahoo search box.
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Adobe updates its Web development tool with support for Microsoft .Net.
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Macromedia has launched Flex Builder, a development tool for its Flex application-development platform. The new tool will help speed creation of rich Internet applications, including visual data
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Apollo runtime is dubbed 'Adobe AIR' and due for testing along with Flex update.
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Adobe lowers the price of its Shockwave graphics tool which adds support for Ageia PhysX and DirectX 9.
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InfoWorld - In an effort to lure more developers to its tools for building RIAs, Adobe is making its Flex Builder 2 software available free to students and faculty at educational institutions.
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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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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.