Macromedia Studio MX

Flash MX impresses with its support for open standards, but the tightest integration is with ColdFusion. First, ColdFusion MX offers a charting engine for on-the-fly graph production. More importantly, it offers live server debugging from within Flash MX and natively supports the Flash Remoting Service with its high-speed data exchange. Best of all, ColdFusion MX provides support for server-side ActionScript for executing queries, pre-processing data and invoking Web Services.

With further server-side enhancements promised in the form of dedicated messaging and improved media-streaming capabilities, there's little doubt that the richest Web experience for end users is going to come in the form of Flash interfaces interacting in real-time with ColdFusion-hosted data and components. To provide this performance and experience, Macromedia's MX platform effectively supplants the underlying HTML-based Internet architecture with the Flash MX player. This takes over from its browser host and interacts with the ColdFusion MX Server, which is itself running on and taking over from its own server host.

The resulting Rich Internet Application shows the MX platform working at its best in terms of client, server and development tool integration, but this Macromedia-only route is only going to be a serious option for a small percentage of users for some time to come. What's really remarkable about Macromedia's MX platform and its Studio MX development suite is that it's just as comfortable adding a basic Fireworks rollover to a simple HTML or XHTML page, as it is adding a multimedia Flash extravaganza to an ASP, JSP, PHP or ASP .NET page.

Ultimately, Macromedia must first make sure Studio MX supports all standards and then do everything it can to ensure its own preferred solution is the most attractive. Maybe Microsoft has something to learn.

Author: Tom Arah