Adobe Advances Flash Platform with New AIR, Cloud, Flex Solutions

Adobe also announced a public beta of its cloud computing solution, a platform-as-a-service solution codenamed "Cocomo."

Wadhwani said Cocomo enables Adobe Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIAs. Comprised of both Flex-based client components and a hosted services infrastructure, Cocomo allows developers to build real-time, multiuser applications with Flex in less time than ever before, the company said. And because Acrobat.com hosts the service, issues such as deployment, maintenance and scalability are taken care of for the developer, Wadhwani said.

Cocomo enables developers to add social features to their existing Flex applications or build totally new ones, such as real-time productivity/collaboration applications, multiplayer games, and audio/video chat, Wadhwani said.

Meanwhile, Wadhwani said that in September at least 25 million end users had at least one Adobe AIR application, "and we're on target to hit 100 million within the first year of the technology being available." Wadhwani said Adobe AIR should reach 100 million users by February 2009, which will mark one year of availability for the technology.

In addition, several Adobe partners made supporting announcements relating to Adobe technology. Acesis announced a new software-as-a-service solution that leverages the Adobe Flash Platform to measure doctor performance and reduce medical errors. Ensemble introduced a new offering called Ensemble Tofino for Visual Studio, a plug-in that enables .NET developers to create Flex front ends for their applications using Microsoft Visual Studio. SAP announced that it is enabling SAP developers to take advantage of Flex components to develop rich user interfaces for SAP applications. And Zend announced the first deliverable of the Adobe and Zend partnership with Adobe’s contribution of Action Message Format (AMF) support in the new 1.7 release of Zend Framework. This new AMF component enables developers to optimize data communication between Zend Framework server-side PHP components and client-side Adobe Flex components.

In an attempt to not be outdone as Adobe celebrates its success at its annual user/developer conference, Microsoft weighed in with a few points around its Flash competitor, Silverlight. Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division, blogged about Silverlight's successes and rehashes several recent announcements to hype the platform. The one new thing he mentions is but a tease.

Said Guthrie about the future of Silverlight:

"Next year we will ship our next major Silverlight release -- Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3-D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements -- we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. Next year Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express will also support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight and add tool support for data-binding."