Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Macromedia's, er, Abode's Internet apps platform advances

January 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Macromedia's, er, Abode's Internet apps platform advances

TAGS: Applications

Having completed its merger with Macromedia, Adobe within a few weeks is set to release a public beta version of its Flex 2.0 rich Internet application development technology. Flex also will begin bearing the Adobe name.

With the upcoming release of Flex, Adobe is looking to expand the user base from its present installed base of 5,000 to 10,000 users to 1 million developers in a few years, said David Mendels, senior vice president of enterprise and developer business at Adobe. The company plans to do this by separating the Flex tool and framework from Macromedia server technology and allowing deployments on any J2EE or .Net server.

"We're server-agnostic," said Mendels, who moves over to Adobe from Macromedia. Adobe held a party at the former Macromedia offices in San Francisco on Thursday evening to tout the merger and its resulting products.

Flex 2.0 features improved performance, a new IDE based on the Eclipse platform and new licensing options.

Asked about the burgeoning AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML) for rich Internet application development, Adobe officials described Flex 2.0 as similar but more powerful than AJAX.

"It's the same model," as AJAX, Mendels said.

Flex 2.0 already has been available in a less-developed alpha release. The general release is set for the first half of this year. Flex applications use Adobe's ubiquitous Adobe Flash technology on the client side.

-- By Paul Krill, reporting from Adobe's party.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on January 20, 2006 10:41 AM

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