Macromedia is building a bridge to the
next computing era with the next release of its Flash platform, a full stack
designed to entice a new generation of developers to its animation software.
And just to make sure that it’s reaching as many developers as possible,
Macromedia also joined the open source Java tools group Eclipse Foundation.
The plan is to work with the Eclipse integrated development environment
“The strategy of joining Eclipse is significant,” said Peter O’Kelley, an analyst with tech research firm Burton Group. “This means the capabilities
inside Flash will be available to developers without requiring them to move
to a different tool to work with it.”
Macromedia’s updated player, code-named Maelstrom, is the backbone of the
Flash platform, which includes a universal client runtime, an openly published
file format (SWF) specification, programming models, development tools and
dedicated server technology — all the stuff developers need to build Flash-based user
interfaces.
Kevin Lynch, chief software architect for Macromedia, said Maelstrom
takes Flash into a new galaxy with the soup-to-nuts tools, including server
support, components and libraries.
“It’s important to expand the reach beyond the current Flash community,”
he told internetnews.com. “There are about one million Flash
developers today. But now, they don’t have to use [a specific] authoring
tool. They can create a Flash UI just by using this. Anyone who is
familiar with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages
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Flash is installed on roughly 98 percent of PCs on the planet, by
Macromedia’s reckoning. But the San Francisco company is keenly aware
that smaller, more powerful computing devices are the future, and that it
needs to get Flash embedded in that computing world. For a company that
gets roughly 60 percent of its revenues from Flash sales and licensing,
this is a critical strategy. So far, the company has plenty to crow about.
“Now, we’re getting into lots of mobile devices, and platforms too: Mac,
Linux, Solaris, as well as on the server side with J2EE and .NET,” Lynch said.
“Flash works with any of these things.” Macromedia also is making its way
into Nokia’s world, with a recent deal that gets Flash to work on Nokia’s
Series 60, Series 80 and Series 40 phones.
The platform offers developers their own declarative language
called MXML, which is designed to help developers build rich user
interfaces. The language is a similar approach to Microsoft’s XAML, an XML-based markup language that helps developers separate the UI code from
application logic. The idea is to change the UI without a lot of
re-programming of the data that needs to be fed into that UI. “You can download
the UI once and go get the data as you need it,” Lynch said. “Only with
MXML, it works with all browsers,” Lynch added, referring to languages such
as Java, which can require different code for different platforms.
The language is central to Macromedia’s goal to give developers a way to
host Flash-based applications outside of a browser on a desktop PC. The
company dubs the approach “occasional computing.”
At the same time, he added, Macromedia is rounding out its presence in
the mobile market with deals that get its Flash player on Nokia phones, as
well as on NTT DoCoMo’s popular iMode content services for the Japanese
carrier’s subscribers.
“The challenge with Macromedia has been that developers had to take a
different approach with Flash. It’s different than [tools] such as Visual
Basic, Visual Studio or Eclipse,” O’Kelley added. “Now, this brings Flash
to developers without requiring them to move to a different tool. I think
this is a milestone for them.”
The release marks the last independent project and platform for
Macromedia, which onetime rival Adobe is acquiring in a $3.4 billion merger deal. Once the Department of Justice signs off on
its antitrust review of this merger of the dominant publishing and graphics
companies, the two are committed to combining their platforms in order
to focus on the mobile and enterprise sectors.