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Kas Thomas

Adobe's brave new stack

8-Jul-2008

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Web Content and Experience Management, Information Architecture, Marketplace at Large, Open Source

Over at the Adobe Developer Connection website, Belgian developer Sebastien Arbogast has posted an interesting article (a tutorial of sorts) on how to write next-generation web apps in Flex. What's interesting isn't the Flex part (or the demo app itself, which is rather uninspired) but the underlying stack, which gives some hint, I think, of what Adobe's Flex evangelistas may be envisioning as LAMP-Next. It's a combination of Flex (for the presentation layer), BlazeDS (for messaging and presence), Spring (the runtime framework), Hibernate (for persistence), and MySQL (data layer). The application server used in Arbogast's example happens to be JBoss, but it could just as easily be something else.

Arbogast's example-app is just a tiny taste of what's possible. A slightly more interesting demo built using these technologies is the collaborative webform built by Adobe's own Christophe Coenraets (who gives a code walkthrough here). Two or more people can work on this form collaboratively in their respective browsers, from separate locations. Any resulting edits are visible to all participants. Mind you, it's nothing that can't be done right now using HTML and AJAX. But the point is, this is Adobe's idea of what's next (something quite a bit Flashier and less HTML-feeling).

Anyone who thinks Adobe's aspirations in areas like ECM, WCM, and DAM are limited to the recent much-ballyhooed OEM deal with Alfresco is missing the point. Adobe's goals are far loftier. Adobe, it seems, wants nothing less than to make its content technologies as pervasive as ... the Web itself. Even if it has to assemble a new stack to get there.