JD's Forum

Beta was fun, sure, it's always nice to see new features. But now the tools are fitting together—Dreamweaver creating ColdFusion components and querying distant services, the Flash Remoting invisibly conveying messages, ColdFusion using the same code to deliver to HTML or SWF or XML—it's getting scary. It feels like the first time I went online, or the first time I saw Shockwave in a browser, only more so.

It makes too much sense—it's too exciting a pattern. There must be a catch somewhere. But I can't find a hole in it. Can you tell me what's wrong with this picture?

Here are clear trends I see:

1. The economic contraction seems to have bottomed out.

2. Business clients want more from the web than just presenting a brochure... they want customers to be able to do things with their sites, not just look at things. Web applications seem ready to grow quickly.

3. Over the last two years web designers and developers have learned more skills, with cross-training overcoming the specialization we saw in the dot-com boom. I think we're all a lot smarter about web work than we've ever been before.

4. For the first time there's a toolset which is integrated across tools, clients, and servers. Dreamweaver creates text displays and now codes major server-side scripting languages such as ColdFusion, which in turn can offer special services to both Dreamweaver authoring and the ubiquitous Macromedia Flash Player. Now this area is much cheaper to learn and to work with everyday.

5. There are still a lot of desktop and portable computers, but other connectivity devices are increasing, slowly and surely. Messengers, phones, organizers, embedded connectivity in cars and other appliances, the popularity varies by area with local connectivity norms, but usage is increasing in all categories month by month.

6. Servers can talk with each other now too. Web services have been hyped, just as devices have been, but there's still real growth underlying the media frenzy. When your server can retrieve and re-format data from anywhere in the world, and present it on demand in a customer interface to a portable device, you've got something which will turn the whole world upside down.

7. The developer communities are far more cohesive than they've ever been before. Smart people around the world are building sites, writing books, creating samples and components, on newsgroups and mailing lists and weblogs. It's easier to stand on the shoulders of giants than ever before.

I think we're on the edge of some historic positive changes, which will be economical enough to develop within any society, to deliver to people anywhere they can get a connection. I think we can make all people richer with this revolution.

But I know I'm an optimist, and I know I've been wrong before. So, help me out here, am I missing something, is there some way these trends will not converge? I try to imagine what objections might come up in the newsgroups, and they all seem a little off-key to me:

(Q) I don't want to be locked into a single vendor!
(A) That's fine, because you don't have to be. I think lots of people will work entirely within Macromedia MX just because it's less expensive and more efficient, but you can combine authoring tools, server technologies, and deliverable file formats as you desire. Macromedia MX is built to be technology-neutral, platform-agnostic, interoperable with whatever you like.

(Q) It's too expensive!
(A) I guess some people will say this, although I don't understand how... the software purchase prices are startlingly affordable, and the greater benefit is in the time you save in learning curve and daily production costs. But sure, if you don't see yourself getting a good return on investment for a toolset, then choose something that you find gives you a better bang for the buck. (And let me know what it is too, thanks, I'd like to learn! ;-)

(Q) It's proprietary!
(A) It's true that Dreamweaver MX is written by Macromedia instead of being
open source, but extensions can be designed through whichever process your
prefer. ColdFusion Server uses Java internally, but floats above various server platforms and frameworks. Lots of tools create SWF files, and although other folks have written SWF renderers, these haven't been distributed widely enough to give us the browser-war incompatibilities. Is there an actual problem, or is this more a first-principles kind of thing?

(Q) I saw a Macromedia Flash animation once and it sucked, I always hit the skip intro button.
(A) So don't use Macromedia Flash. That's just one delivery channel, a predictable and very capable client-side interactivity engine. You can still put out to markup or text. (You really should look into Macromedia Flash, though, it expands your toolbox dramatically.)

(Q) I'm a designer, not a programmer!
(A) I hope you didn't make the "Skip Intro" piece the other fellow was complaining about above... ;-) A designer is someone who finds appropriate and useful solutions. Visual layout is one part of being a designer. Setting up interactions and logic requires design skills too. If you can think well, and appropriately, then we need you in this new work.

(Q) ColdFusion Server isn't on the Mac!
(A) That's true, sorry. ColdFusion Server can run atop various Java 2 Enterprise Edition servers, and Mac OS X Server includes only Java 2 Standard Edition. Atop that, Macs aren't yet able to do introspection or proxy generation (I don't have full details), so web services are harder. But as someone who designs pages and applications for PCs, you really should have a few PCs in your local network anyway, and these can be used for those particular things PCs can do while you use your Mac as your main design machine.

(Q) We're an all-Microsoft shop (or all-PHP, or all-whatever)!
(A) Sometimes I'm not sure whether people who use this phrase mean they're oriented around particular technologies, or whether they're actually refusing to consider anything without that particular label, whether it's a personal-identity objection. The Macromedia MX tools focus on platform-agnosticism... there's advantage to us in working well in whatever environment. But hey, if you've got some other way to ride this wave, then go for it! The more excellent work there is out there, the better for all of us.

(Q) It's too hard to learn all this stuff!
(A) I agree that there's a lot to this type of work... heck, the first time I saw HTML markup I wondered if anyone would ever remember all that stuff, and now we're working with databases and XML and these new web services too. There is a lot of stuff. But one of the goals with Macromedia MX is to make this type of work more approachable, as well as more efficient. This seems about an order of magnitude easier to work with than anything in the past, and clients will have paying work for this type of development.

(Q) This preview release is a sham, you'll ship regardless of what we say!
(A) Well, it's true that these versions won't change much before final shipment... the features are usually pretty much frozen by the time we go into private beta, much less go public. But the various development teams will be harvesting requests from the special newsgroups for how people want these tools to evolve in the future. This is a good time to get a lay of the land, and examine what I think are radical reductions in production costs for web work. Even if you can't afford the download and examination time yourself, it's good to check into the conversations, see how it all appears to other people. I really think there are opportunities for you here.

(Q) I'm not gonna do it, because it's not Director!
(A) Well, it's true that Director and Authorware don't deliver directly to HTML or SWF—they excel in creating standalone applications. Although Director can deliver to the majority of consumer browsers, with over half of those already having realtime 3D rendering abilities introduced in Director 8.5, it isn't a ubiquitous and multidevice format like HTML or SWF are. Still, you can take your existing skills in design and development into HTML and SWF delivery, if you like...your wetware is a much bigger investment than any software.

So, there must be a catch—I just can't figure out what it is—it sounds too good to be true. Let us know in the discussion thread. Last week the big takeaway I heard was for LiveDocs, although that thread is still open for more comments too.

By the way, for daily updates on what I and my partners are seeing among the newsgroups, keep an eye on our various weblogs during this Preview Release period... Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Bob Tartar and I each keep a public diary on things we're seeing and hearing from the development community.