Adobe Dishes Up a Full Plate for Enterprise Application Development

With enterprise application development taking a high profile, this year's Adobe MAX developers' conference in Los Angeles featured a very full roster of announcements. From Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 to some significant additions to the Flash development platform, new releases and shifts in Adobe's product emphasis were announced at a fast and furious pace, so fast that a number of demonstrations in the opening keynote session didn't work.

LiveCycle is Adobe's suite of products designed to provide the data connectivity, security and ease of use required by enterprise-level applications. Adobe's main approach is to tighten the links between LiveCycle application development and the Flash Platform. Or, as described more colorfully by Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Business Productivity Business Unit, "we aim to disprove the myth that enterprise application development is where great technology goes to die."

Additions to LiveCycle include LiveCycle plug-in for Flash Builder, LiveCycle Workspace (for mobile devices), and LiveCycle Launchpad (for desktop applications). Of particular interest are LiveCycle Collaboration Services, which extend the range of hosted applications, and other options for development of applications in the cloud.

The heart of what's new in LiveCycle ES2 is the announcement of a Rich Internet Application development framework, called the Mosaic framework, to facilitate creating enterprise-level applications through cobbling together 'tiles' (applets) that are modular but allow integrated presentation and data sharing. By another name, this is mashup technology, an important element in Web 2.0 and a direction pursued by other enterprise software vendors such as IBM. Adobe's commitment to this enterprise-level framework is illustrated by the development of a new application modeling language (which looks a little like UML, but isn't).

In tandem with the LiveCycle announcements is the immediate release of ColdFusion 9, Adobe's application server and server-side development environment. The IDE, ColdFusion Builder, will soon party-up with Flash Builder and LiveCycle Builder as plug-ins under the Eclipse IDE roof. Also in development is ColdFusion in the Cloud.

The big news for the Flash developer crowd was the announcement of Flash Player 10.1, which as Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe put it, "…is one small step for Adobe, one big step for the Flash world." The release signals a major push by Adobe, mainly through its partners in the Open Screen Project (OSP), to make the Flash Player run well on mobile devices. Significantly, the addition of Google and RIM as members of OSP was announced today.

It was also announced that the Flash Platform will soon feature a new HTTP streaming capability for video presentation. Other elements of the Flash Platform introduced today were the release of AIR 2.0 (Adobe's desktop version for Flash applications), Flash Builder Beta 2 (formerly Flex Builder, Adobe's prime RIA IDE), Catalyst Beta 2 (a new product for adding visual effects and web 'behaviors' to Flash applications), and the aforementioned LiveCycle Collaboration Service.

The surprise announcement of the day was that Flash can run on the Apple iPhone. Well, sort of. This does not represent a healing of wounds between the two corporations. Adobe has produced a compiler for (some) Flash applications so that they can run in native code on the iPhone. Flash Player itself is still not supported.

LiveCycle ES2, ColdFusion 9 were released immediately, along with the betas of Catalyst and Flash Builder. Most of the products, including Flash Player 10.1 beta, will be made available by the end of 2009, with HTTP streaming scheduled for first quarter 2010.

Check out InformationWeek Analytics' related report on "Setting Priorities For Next-Generation Web Apps."