Macromedia MAX 2003 Topic Center

Executive Vice President of Marketing Al Ramadan opened the general session saying that experience continues to matter. Today's web is seeing a merging of content and applications, and great digital experiences are great business. The name we are giving these great experiences on the web is Rich Internet Applications. After giving a quick demo of the Intro application , Al introduced Macromedia President of Products, Norm Meyrowitz.

Norm explained how there are four transformations currently taking place on the web today, and how the Macromedia Product Agenda is evolving to meet these challenges. The are Macromedia products and product families to meet these needs.

Figure 1. Al Ramadan, Executive Vice President of Marketing

1. On the web, we're seeing a shift from inaction to interaction. To fill this need, Macromedia offers the Studio MX 2004 and Flex products to help designers and developer create more interactive web experiences.
2. We are moving from arduous eLearning to rapid eLearning. Macromedia recently announced that eHelp and its products will join the Macromedia family of products. Combined with Authorware, Breeze Live, and Director, RoboDemo and RoboHelp will bring rapid eLearning experiences to the web.
3. Today's web is moving from being read-only to being a read/write web where everyone can contribute. The information convenience product family of Breeze and Contribute are helping everyday, non-web professionals create web content and collaborate online in ways never before possible.
4. Internet experiences are moving from hunter/gatherer activities to where information finds you. Both Macromedia Central and Mobile and Devices group are building applications and technology that push information to the end user.

Figure 2. Norm Meyrowitz, President of Products

Leading off the demonstrations of cool, new applications created with MX 2004, Akio Tanaka showed a new application from Sony called Life with DVD. This virtual environment includes an interactive character who reacts to user input. When a user chooses a DVD to watch, the character pulls it from a shelf in his ultramodern living room, inserts it into his DVD player, and high quality Flash video plays back (in this case, "The Matrix") on his television.

Tanaka also showed another amazing application from well-known Flash developer Yugo Nakamura. Created for ITL, this interactive architectural portfolio expands the metaphor of the card-based database. When a user sorts the cards, they move and arrange themselves in groups—light years ahead of your usual search results interface.

"He says he could not have built this without Flash MX 2004," said Tanaka of Nakamura's comments on his development process. Macromedia Flash Player 7 performance makes the "smooth, liquid feel" of the application possible.

Norm then invited the Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion product teams up to discuss how the Macromedia MX products are helping designers and developers bring interaction to the web.

Dreamweaver Product Manager, Jennifer Taylor talked about how the new CSS features in Dreamweaver MX 2004 offer web designers improved work flow. She then demonstrated how the Relevant CSS panel in Dreamweaver could be used to almost instantly apply visually engaging designs to html pages. The new cross-browser support features give developers immediate feedback to find problems for target browsers.

"The first thing that we've noticed is that the designer/developer split doesn't work," said Lucian Beebe, Flash Product Manager, in reference to the skills of people using Flash today. "Everyone can reach in both directions." Beebe proceeded to run through the bevy of new features in Flash MX Professional 2004: data integration (including web services support and data binding), ActionScript 2.0, and extensibility. He showed how to build a web service-based distance calculator, which returns the distance from a fixed point (like a store) to the user's current location, based on ZIP code input. He showed how Flash "guides you through" the process of connecting to a web service and binding data from it to interface elements, such as Label components.

Beebe also highlighted the new updater and content in the Flash Developer Center, citing developer reaction to the "tremendous" number of new features in Flash MX 2004. "You guys told us that you need a lot more guidance," he said. The team has listened and has provided a lot of new content in the form of tutorials, presentations, and samples in the new version of the developer center.

To help answer the need for moving from arduous eLearning experiences to creating Rapid eLearning experiences, Macromedia recently announced that eHelp will be joining the Macromedia family of products. eHelp Product Manager, Silke Fleischer profiled a site by Orion Studios where RoboHelp was used to rapidly create rich online help system. Silke then demo'd RoboDemo with Dreamweaver showing how easy and fast it is to create multimedia tutorials.

Figure 3. Jennifer Taylor, Lucian Beebe, Ben Forta

Ben Forta , Senior ColdFusion Evangelist, talked about how ColdFusion MX was the most ambitious version of ColdFusion yet and it's still going to grow beyond that. Starting with the ubiquity of ColdFusion-powered websites—he demonstrated how he planned his trip to Utah: OneWorld for flights, Marriot for accommodations, Go-Utah.com for activities, Fodors.com for dining, National Park Service (ha! should we all have time), the Utah Senate website for politics, Bank of America, and last, but not least, the Ogden county website to see about liquor licenses in the state. "Anybody see a theme here?" he asked. To go on, ColdFusion ranked ahead of ASP, PHP, and JSP for powering the United States government websites. We're all aware of the new features in ColdFusion MX by now (Ben added that multiple instances is, in his opinion, the most important new feature). In fact, the amount of ColdFusion pages that return based on Google search yields 10,000,000 pages. Now that we all know about ColdFusion MX, however, he whetted everyone's appetite for the next version of ColdFusion, code-named Blackstone.

Blackstone, Ben cautions, is still being conceived. As a preview, he gave a quick preview of the major themes that Blackstone will address:

• Control over reporting and printing output
• Making RAD more rapid—giving developers simpler ways to create compelling UIs.
• Increasing productivity—watch what the CF developers are doing, those mundane daily tasks, and find ways to make it more productive.
• New ways for deploying your apps, most importantly, source code protection

During Wednesday evening's ColdFusion Meet the Engineers birds-of-a-feather session, he wants developers to come and voice their development needs. And not only to voice them there, but in betas, user groups, and to Ben directly…so go to it! Additionally, there will be a sneak peak of Blackstone from 4-5 Thursday in the Grand Ballroom.

Figure 4. Dave Mendels, SVP and General Manager MX 2004

But beyond the Macromedia MX family, there are new ways that the Macromedia MX universe will continue to expand. The trend doesn't stop with ColdFusion MX. Dave Mendels, SVP and General Manager MX 2004, introduced Macromedia Flex, a presentation-tier server and XML-based language that runs on top of a J2EE app server. The key theme with Macromedia Flex—it's a way for developers to create RIAs through code, in particular, XML. This makes creating RIAs easier for enterprise developers working in Java, C, ColdFusion, .Net, and so forth; they can create MXML, the Macromedia Flex markup language in whichever IDE they prefer, Intellij, IBM Eclipse, or the new WY S IWYG editor for writing MXML from Macromedia, code-named Brady.

Figure 5. Christophe Coenraets, Senior Technical Evangelist and Heidi Williams, Brady Engineering Manager

Next, in a short three-minute presentation, Senior Flex Evangelist, Christophe Coenraets, and Brady Engineering Manager, Heidi Williams, coded and designed a customized stock widget with MXML tags and Brady. The audience audibly "ooohed" when Heidi's design changes left Christophe's coding beautifully alone and then again, they "ooohed" when Heidi modified an accordion panel by browsing it in Design view, moving to the bottom accordion panel, and then going into Code view to insert a datagrid. Now that's WY S IWYG integration that developers want to use.

Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technology at IBM reinforced this workflow, as one of his key J2EE developers explained how he created an RIA through MXML code authored in IBM Eclipse, without ever opening Macromedia Flash. Again, Flex appeals to developers because they can continue to work in environments that are familiar to them. Rod emphasized that the way that Macromedia Flex adheres to open standards was an important reason for using it; he encouraged all developers to be aware of those open standards as they create their RIAs.

Dave invited everyone to join the Flex beta and attend the Macromedia Flex birds-of-a-feather session on Thursday at 6 PM to see more. See your agenda for more details.

Next, Norm invited Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Macromedia to the stage. Kevin announced the developer release of Macromedia Central and the Central Software Development Kit (SDK). (You can download the SDK on the Central Developer Center at http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/central .) The mission of Central is "helping people deal with distributed information," said Lynch. He showed how the Central interface works—it comprises a console that displays tidbits of information or updates, an application window where more detailed information is displayed, and agents that work in the background, handling the data flow. MAX attendees got a first glance at some of the new applications that are in store for Central users including a BlogReader, a Freeware Finder, a Developer Chat, and the MAX Conference guide.

Figure 6. Kevin Lynch, Executive Vice President and Chief Software Architect

On the developer side, Lynch showed a diagram of all the new components built for the Central environment. MAX attendees were able to pick this up at the conference, however, if you weren't here, you can download a copy of it as well, in the Central Developer Center .

Another big piece of Central news at the session was integration with instant messaging. "We at AOL always believed that IM (instant messaging) was a platform, but we never did anything to allow developers to integrate it into their apps," said Edmund Fish, SVP and GM of AOL Instant Messaging. "But that changed today." The AOL team proceeded to show a demonstration of how to bring AOL IM functionality into a Central application, showing that Central and AOL Instant Messenger partnered together really create a great user experience when it comes to getting and sharing information.

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About the authors

George Fox is the Developer Center Publishing Process Manager for Macromedia where he acts as lead editor and manages the sample applications as well as the content in the Studio, Dreamweaver, Contribute, Fireworks, Director, FreeHand, ASP.NET, and PHP Developer Centers. He holds an MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Before traveling extensively in Asia, Alaska and the North Western US, George had careers in Training/Organizational Development and Business Process Analysis.

Craig Goodman is the Managing Editor of the Developer Center. He also serves as the lead editor for the Macromedia Flash, Flash Communication Server, Flash Remoting, and Mobile and Devices Developer Centers, as well as working on the macromedia.com Support Centers. Craig joined Macromedia in 1995. Before the creation of the Macromedia Developer Center, he had various roles, including managing web support, supervising product technical support for Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver, and providing one-to-one technical support for Director and Extreme 3D. Craig also curates the video and film series at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and is a member of the sit-down keyboard ensemble, the Helen Lundy Trio.

Amy Wong has been the Developer Center editor for server products (ColdFusion, JRun) since 2002. She has developed ColdFusion apps since version 1.5 and remembers when she first fell in love with the language. She loved it so much that she came to Allaire in 1999 to work in the ColdFusion support forums, helping customers where she first sought help as a fledgling developer. From working in product support as a support engineer to TechNote editor, she is happy to still be heavily involved with ColdFusion content and the community. When she's not thinking about ColdFusion, Amy is usually calming the adrenaline junkie within, in her whitewater kayak, either upside-down or right-side up, on the rivers of New England and Canada.