A New World Emerges for the Adobe Flash Platform

In the old Adobe world for designers and developers of rich Internet Web applications, there was Flash, the ubiquitous client program, Flash Professional (CS3), used to create Flash programs (especially animations), and Adobe Flex Builder 3, the programmer’s tool for creating Flash applications. In short, the old Adobe world had Flash products for designers and Flex products for developers. The gulf between them was chasmatic, especially for enterprise-level projects that needed to shuffle development responsibilities between designers and coders.

In the new Adobe world there are still Flash and Flash Professional (CS4); but now there is also Adobe Flash Catalyst. This is a new product targeted for Flash designers and developers who need to more easily create interactive Web content and user interface elements. Artwork or programming developed in Adobe tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional can be brought into Catalyst to add Web effects such as events, transitions and motion. The finished output of Catalyst can generate an Adobe SWF file, for inclusion in Web applications, or an Adobe AIR (desktop) application. The output is automatically coded using Adobe MXML, which can be readily transferred to or from the developer’s tool Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder).

The old Adobe world was capable but complicated, sometimes obscuring its benefits from both designers and developers. The new Adobe world puts the potentially game-changing product, Adobe Flash Catalyst, in a position to entice both developers and designers to share their contributions through a tool that makes creating "Web 2.0" effects much easier. The new Adobe world also provides a revised architectural code structure, the open source Flex Framework 4, to unite what the designer does in Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst with what the developer does in Flash Builder.

Some of the changes are mostly a matter of repackaging. For example, Flex Builder becomes Flash Builder. But the changes pave the way for humanly comprehensible processes that share development between designers and programmers. What’s really new is the combination of Catalyst and Flash Builder to provide the prototyping convenience of products such as ProtoShare and Axure, as well as an enterprise level of tools for data connectivity, security, and application logic (as found in comprehensive IDEs such as Microsoft .Net).

All this adds up to a coherent, if nascent, Flash development platform; one designed explicitly for the interactive Web and the Flash client. Although "Flash Platform" has been part of the Adobe vocabulary for a while, this iteration begins to credibly stitch together other diverse pieces of Adobe software -- Adobe Creative Suite 4, Adobe LiveCycle ES, Adobe ColdFusion -- with the core designer/developer combination of Flash Professional, , and Flash Builder.

Public beta versions of Adobe Flash Catalyst, Adobe Flash Builder 4, and the Flex Framework 4 are available (from June 1) at the Adobe Labs Web site (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash).