Macromedia: Tussling with Longhorn

The ongoing mantra being repeated by Macromedia executives at this year's Max 2003 conference is the idea of blending the role of developer and designer -- developing tools that bridge the gap between an application's appearance and performance. "We want to create applications with great design and design with great functionality," said Macromedia's president of products Norm Meyrowitz, speaking at the opening session for the conference held this year in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The overall aim seems to be to move Macromedia on from being a company that is perceived to be all about design -- exemplified by its hugely successful Flash animation product -- to a real player in Web application development. "The merger of content and apps is a major industry trend. It's all about blurring the line between development and design," says executive vice-president Al Ramadan.

Macromedia's transition from being mainly known for Flash to a "rich-Internet" applications company was given a shot in the arm with the acquisition of Allaire two years ago with its Coldfusion Web application server. The latest push in the direction of fusing Web design and development is a product due to ship in the first half of 2004 called Flex. The product, which has lived under the code name Royale up until it was formally announced at the beginning of this week, is a combination of server software and other tools to enable traditional Web application developers to create components in Macromedia's Flash format.

"Flex is about re-factoring how Flash applications are developed and deployed into a form factor that these professional developers will find intuitive," says Macromedia product manager Rod Hodgman. "It's a presentation server that provides a text-based programming model -- if you have coded in JSP, ASP or HTML you'll find pretty easy to pick up and understand."

IBM is also backing the project because of the potential impact on its WebSphere J2EE Web application server platform. IBM's vice president of emerging technology, Rod Smith, claims Flex will enable companies to create sophisticated Flash applications that plug into existing infrastructure: "The work around J2EE and XML has been about expanding ebusiness without making costs crazy. I hear customers saying they want to integrate with what they already have."