Canadian developers keen to begin developing with new Macromedia tool

Macromedia is hoping to build on the spectacular success of its Flash authoring tools with a new application that extends the rich client interface of Flash, and its ubiquity, with enterprise data that companies already have to build a new generation of ecommerce and intranet sites. In the process, Macromedia is hoping to bridge the divide between designers comfortable working in a Flash environment and programmers who have access to the back-end. The product, dubbed Flex is already attracting attention from Canadian web developers, many of whom have already had the chance to kick its tires as they evaluate its usefulnesss to their own businesses. Macromedia hopes the product will help companies create sites that provide greater feedback to users as they navigate by updating screens using back-end data in real time without refreshing pages, ultimately leading to greater customer satisfaction in using commerce web sites to do such things as custom configure products or when other client-side processing is required - areas where HTML-built sites are woefully inadequate. Macromedia senior product manager Libby Freligh tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that Flex uses the Flash runtime engine, making sites created instantly accessible across an installed base of nearly 500 million personal computers. Unlike Java script models which create a high server load, the Flex product can create rich Internet applications with low bandwidth requirements. The company will soon be coming out with a new toolkit, dubbed Brady, that will allow developers to create rich Internet applications in a visual environment - the tools are based on those in the company’s Dreamweaver product. Development can also be done in standard text editors and standard integrated development environments. Freligh says it’s still early days for selling Flex, but the company is already highlighting some mid-tier players who have implemented it for their own sites, including Mini USA. Big names are still absent from the list, but Freligh says announcements are soon to come about new and larger customers. Asked whether there will be a certification program to use the platform, Freligh says she’s developing a three-day course, though it won’t launch until some time next year as Macromedia hones the curriculum to best meet the industry’s needs. Freligh says that Macromedia will also embark on an ambitious program to study user interfaces to assess usability principles. Canadian developers are already seeing the potential benefits. Dmitri Melamed, lead Flash developer at Fourth Wall Media in Toronto, tells CNM that Flex is "quite the exciting little package they have." Melamed has only had the chance to evaluate Flex at a cursory level, but says each of the benefits Macromedia is promising seems real, and he’s confident the technology will do as advertised. In fact, his only hesitation is that some developers might go overboard with the flexibility they now have. "This allows you to go crazy," he says. Users who aren’t used to rich graphical sites, he says, might be intimidated by all the GUI options they’ll now have when visiting a Flex site. He says the immediate applications he sees, besides in the ecom space, would be in finance, banking, insurance and other areas where users might want to manipulate data in real time on screen. He predicts that Flex-built sites will boom over the next six months, and says it won’t likely be long before Fourth Wall begins using it, as well.

Canadian developers keen to begin developing with new Macromedia tool

Broadcast | June 25, 2004

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