Macromedia, Allaire Partner To Develop Flash Integration Toolkit

Macromedia and Allaire on Monday will unveil a toolkit that enables integrators to wed interactive content with server-side development platforms.

Code-named Harpoon, the toolkit will preview at Allaire's user conference in Washington.

Harpoon will give developers using Allaire's ColdFusion or Java-based JRun application platforms the ability to integrate user interface (UI) and media capabilities of Macromedia's Flash Player into their applications, says Diane Li, product manager on the Flash team at Macromedia.

Developers will be able to download a free beta in December from both Allaire and Macromedia Web sites, with the full toolkit appearing on those sites early next year, Li says. The full toolkit also will be free.

Harpoon will give developers working in both the ColdFusion and JRun environments the ability to add high-impact Flash content to Web sites, says Adam Berrey, director of product management at Allaire.

"We've heard from a lot of our partners that there are two things they're trying to do--be as productive as possible and move as fast as possible," says Berrey. "Using Harpoon, integrators can take advantage of Flash, JRun and ColdFusion to build B2C and B2B applications [that are] a lot richer and interactive."

The need to develop interactive sites more quickly is driving the evolution of Web development, he adds, thus requiring development environments that can quickly marry back-end code with front-end content.

Within Harpoon will be custom tags that define Flash-based UI controls, such as menu bars, grids and calendars, Berrey says. Developers can then drag and drop the controls, which will be defined for either ColdFusion markup language or Java server pages for ColdFusion or JRun, respectively, into a Web application.

The controls will be processed on the server, and a Flash player will render them on the client side, says Berrey.

Macromedia's Li says that down the line, Macromedia also will release related extensions for its Dreamweaver UltraDev authoring tool. With these extensions, developers can use Dreamweaver to accelerate the use of Flash-based UI capabilities on Allaire platforms.

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