Article Discussion: Will Macromedia Soon Become Micromedia?

Will Macromedia Soon Become Micromedia? If you have any questions or comments about this article then please post them here.

You can read the article here .

that would be nice for all those flash users , but probably spell the doom of Cold Fusion, for all of us CF developers... :-(

So what about SVG? The standard that Adobe helped develop and have done the most to push. The article writes off Adobe as being a company unsuited to rich applications, while ignoring the fact that it effectively already has a competing solution. For a comparison of Flash and SVG (a little old) see http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/com...flash_svg.html. If Adobe buys Macromedia, we might see Flash and SVG merge into something useful; an open standard for "fatter" clients which would be open for "rendering" with server side languages like JSP, PHP, Perl and ASP(.NET).

Outside of Coldfusion, PHP is has had a flash rendering extension for a while now. In practical terms it's unwieldy though - it's based on an outstanding open source project but ultimately the "raw material" of flash in difficult to manipulate. By contrast, as these PHP classes demonstrate it's very easy to generate SVG, it being defined by XML.

In other words, if Adobe buys Macromedia, we'd see these kind of technologies become widespread and open, making them useful to a wide range of developers. Microsoft could happily support them in ASP.NET just like everyone else.

Personally my wish would be that IBM buys Macromedia. The article mistakenly assumes IBM would wish to sell Flash as a product - my guess is they'd just takeover then leave Macromedia to continue doing what they already do, making concession to allow Flash to be something that plays well with J2EE (and therefore websphere). IBM, we should remember, was also a contributor to defining the SVG standard. Let's also not forget that IBM has been in pursuit of a decent client side web technology, having developed Sash, basically a "runtime client" for technologies like Javascript and DHTML which actually works (as opposed to those "standards compatible" browsers out there...). The article is right that IBM is no longer really into selling software - in fact it would rather donate software, such as Eclipse which help promote the fields it sells services in. If IBM buys Macromedia, my guess is they'd leave them to continue developing their tools while merging flash itself with SVG and making a truly open standard.

But going back to the article, I see no convincing argument for why Microsoft should buy Macromedia.



Flash is already on practically every browser. It doesn't need any more promoting. What limits it today is the most popular server side languages, (such as PHP, the most popular) effectively can't render anything useful with it on the fly, hence the opportunity is missed to use it to build the next generation of web based applications.

What Flash needs is to become an open standard - are we really saying this will happen if Microsoft buy Macromedia?

Thats not true, Its quite easy to make dynamic flash with any server side language. Once you know flash's actionscript, it is very easy.

Don't you still need flash to run the animation client side tho Ben?

The problem is the movie itself. Using ActionScript you can integrate a Flash movie with a PHP script (or otherwise; even a web service) but for me the real potential of these type of technologies is being able to render the entire movie in PHP - no need for editing flash.

Right now it's "do able" with the Ming extension ( there's some good examples here: http://www.neuralust.com/~mingdocs/ ) but it's hard to build some kind of useful class library ( along the lines of Java's Swing/AWT or PHP-GTK ) that allows you to construct user interfaces with PHP.

SVG is practically there; the players need perhaps one more generation then it should be possible to build SVG user interfaces on the fly with PHP, applying "call backs" to another PHP script with XML-RPC / SOAP. SVG is also interesting because it allows you to use JavaScript (well ecmascript in fact) where Flash uses actionscript.

What I'm hoping for is something where you can generate a complete interface with some code like;



There's a really good example here plus and better explained example of using HTTP requests in SVG here

The problem described in the latter with HTTP headers I haven't checked out but once that problem is solved, it shouldn't be too hard to build web services clients for SVG, porting projects like this Javascript XML-RPC client.

[NOTE]I havent read any of the other replies so sorry if this is a bit off topic. Its targeted towards the article[ /NOTE



Well, yes Flash is a macromedia product, and sure Microsoft can probably do a lot more with it. But how about the other Macromedia products? Dreamweaver? FireWorks? I doubt these programs will be very successful in the hands of Microsoft. Actually i predict that Dreamweave production will probably be dropped if Microsoft aquires Macromedia. I mean MS has FrontPage, right? They probably wont see any reason to develop and support these 2 at the same time. I think the best would be if MS simply bought Flash, and left Macromedia to develop the rest of it's products.

The last post made a good point about other Macromedia products suddenly becoming useless if bought by Microsoft.

Dreamweaver: Why would Microsoft continue to support JSP and PHP in Dreamweaver when they have their own server-side technology they are pushing, as well as a web editing application (Frontpage). If you remove the JSP, PHP, and CF editing features from Dreamweaver you're left with....Web Matrix basically.

JRun: One of the few entry-level priced servlet containers on the market and one of the better ones overall.

I could see Microsoft integrating Fireworks/Freehand into their product line if not into Visual Studio itself.

The big question I have is, why would Microsoft want Flash so badly? Why would they care? Other than the online game web sites, advertisers (who's Flash ads constantly annoy web users), and marketing people I don't see there being a big demand for Flash as a "Rich content" front end. I think if Microsoft was interested in a rich content system, they would have already made one.

Ditto the last two threads .... Microsoft has no interest in open standards or server languages not based on their .NET centric view of the future. All the small developers out there would be left with using their existing applications (homesite or dreamweaver etc) long after these products disappear from the lexicon of development tools. Can you imagine building database driven sites with frontpage .... ugh .... no, well that makes more than two of us. Talk about removing any competition from the marketplace. And, don't forget your software update contract and all the other predatory schemes practiced by the king of cash ...
It may happen, and since MS has more pocket money than most develped countries, it probably will. But, the original vision of the internet will take one giant step in the wrong direction and more along the path that media and entertainment are now enjoying, one that Microsoft is a huge advocate of .... consolidation.