Along with Flash MX, Macromedia today will preview new server technologies for creating rich Internet applications with the Flash update.
The new technologies include Macromedia ColdFusion MX (the next ColdFusion release, previously code-named “Neo”) for rapid application development, a new technology for high-performance application server connectivity and a new technology for collaboration and communication.
Coming later this year will be a new Macromedia Flash audio and video server with Real-time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) designed to enable a new generation of communication applications for the Internet, Jeremy Clark, Flash product manager told MacCentral.
“It will let users create video and audio streams and do messaging through a central server,” Clark said. “Developers can use it to create communications applications such as video conferencing and whiteboarding systems — anything they can imagine — with Flash.”
“Rich applications are the future of the Internet,” Kevin Lynch, chief software architect, at Macromedia, told MacCentral. “With Macromedia Flash MX and our new server technologies, developers will be able to bring rich content, communications and applications together to deliver radically better user experiences.”
Industry leaders such as E*TRADE Financial and IBM are already using Macromedia Flash MX to build rich Internet applications that deliver a measurable return, he said. E*TRADE Financial speeds up things for customers through Quote Widget, a rich Macromedia Flash application that displays stock quotes without requiring a page refresh. IBM is using Macromedia Flash to deliver an overview of their WebSphere Personalization 4.0 solution. The IBM application loads translated text, dynamically enabling IBM to re-use the same Macromedia Flash MX content in 10 different languages, which resulted in a tenfold reduction in development time.
Flash MX will also offer close integration with ColdFusion to provide a flexible client-server development workflow enabling rapid deployment of rich web applications. For instance, there’ll be optimized integration with ColdFusion, J2EE and .NET servers through a new, optimized data exchange protocol and application server gateway.