Update: Wow, this ended up being really long.
All of the evangelists at Adobe had an offsite today in New York and it was one of the coolest days I’ve had at Adobe. Obviously I can’t get into a bunch of what we talked about but the team had really great in depth meetings with a bunch of products that are semi-public and that you should already know about. We had meetings with the Thermo team, the Pacifica team, the CoCoMo team, and some inter-evangelist presentations on ColdFusion and LiveCycle.
For me as an evangelist and Adobe employee it was great because we got completely free access to ask questions of all these teams and got a full picture across many business units of how all of our technologies are coming together. For you as developers and designers I think there are a bunch of interesting things on the horizon.
Adobe does so many damn things that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. The fact that we picked those three teams to talk to should tell you something. They’re all on the cutting edge of Adobe’s plans and should enable you guys to take RIAs to the next level.
Thermo
I’ll start with Thermo. You’ve heard a bunch about Thermo, so I won’t try to rehash all of that here. We’re building a tool that we think is going to appeal to a wide range of designers – even those not building Flex applications today. Thermo is also a way to help get the Flex Framework out to more people. Flex makes it easy to do some very powerful things with RIAs. Thermo will let designers bring a new level of expressiveness to the framework so that you’ll be able to create very visually appealing applications but with a lot of “under the hood” functionality. Being able to essentially customize Flex applications at the level of our Creative Suite tools is going to let you combine a great rich data story with a great user experience and bring all parts of Adobe’s platform together. Think of all the stuff Flex does well on the developer side, then think about being able to let designers in that process. Thermo is going to be a big tool for the platform.
Pacifica
The second meeting was with Pacifca. High quality voice inside the player is a big deal by itself. And our goal is to let developers bring that into their applications very easily. We want voice to be as much a part of the experience as text is today. A lot of RIAs could benefit from easy, high quality voice. It won’t be a fit for every application but if you can call voice APIs just as easily as you can call Math APIs then you can start to expand your own RIAs quite a bit. Not to mention the ability to call outside phone lines right from Flash. Merging the telephony and technology worlds is something that’s been popular for a long time but making that accessible to web developers hasn’t really been done before. I wasn’t trying to slight Ribbit here. They’re showing how cool this can be when you enable telephony and web developers. I was thinking more about point-to-point voice but that wasn’t clear. Sorry guys, Ribbit rules.
CoCoMo
Our CoCoMo meeting was also great. Connect is a really solid product. Half of my “sales” as an evangelist have been just showing off collaboration inside a Connect meeting using the Flash Player. By taking that and turning it into components that developers can use we’re going to help make real time collaboration a part of RIAs anywhere that it fits. You can just as easily add video chat or whiteboard functionality as you can create a new Panel in Flex. Think about the combination of Flex, Thermo, Pacifica, and CoCoMo inside of your applications and you’ll be able to create a real-time, collaborative experience that goes beyond text and video to be not only good looking, but more personal with voice and teamwork.
ColdFusion and LiveCycle
We also had Adam and Greg present ColdFusion and LiveCycle respectively. ColdFusion is in for some great things. Coté and I have talked a bit about an RIA middleware in our RIA Weekly podcasts and ColdFusion is making huge strides in that direction. One of the best quotes of the day was from Adam in describing ColdFusion as “instant SOA”. ColdFusion combines so many different aspects of technology and brings it together in a way that’s accessible anywhere. You can expose an SMS gateway as a REST service, use Flash Remoting to talk to XMPP or any other combination you can think of. LiveCycle takes that to the next level in a lot of ways. I always thought of LiveCycle as primarily a Document server (and that’s a big part) but it actually automates the workflow for basically anything you want to do. You can set up a process to receive an email and then based on the content do something with a PDF, send a Twitter message, or fire off an FTP command. It lets you work with a bunch of different services together in one workflow and create processes around it. It’s kind of cool to think about being able to take data and then turn it into a protected PDF, a Twitter message, or send it to a Flex application in one big sweep.
Most of this is already here and what isn’t here is coming pretty soon. The power of AIR, the Flash Player, and the Flex Framework enables a lot of very powerful data stories as well as a great user experience. Bringing our design tools, services, and developer technologies together means that all of this will be accessible to you to use in your own applications. Being able to take an application and add interactivity not just at the UI layer but at the data level is a huge leap. Our goal is to make that really easy for you so that you can quickly plug these things into what you’re doing today. Lowering the barrier to entry is half the battle and I think we’ve done that. Over the next few months I am excited to hear what you think and see what you build.
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