Macromedia: Tussling with Longhorn

"Macromedia's transition from being mainly known for Flash to a 'rich-Internet' applications company was given a shot in the arm with the acquisition of Allaire two years ago with its Coldfusion Web application server. The latest push in the direction of fusing Web design and development is a product due to ship in the first half of 2004 called Flex. The product, which has lived under the code name Royale up until it was formally announced at the beginning of this week, is a combination of server software and other tools to enable traditional Web application developers to create components in Macromedia's Flash format.

'Flex is about re-factoring how Flash applications are developed and deployed into a form factor that these professional developers will find intuitive,' says Macromedia product manager Rod Hodgman. 'It's a presentation server that provides a text-based programming model -- if you have coded in JSP, ASP or HTML you'll find pretty easy to pick up and understand.'"

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