New Macromedia product promises easier content production for mobile devices

Macromedia has unveiled a new version of its ColdFusion software, codenamed Blackstone, to ease the creation of web-based, interactive applications for mobile phones and other handheld devices Using SMPP, the same as simple text messaging, Blackstone allows a developer to easily create text-based applications with selectable and browsable menus, among other features that until Feb. 7 (the announcement and launch date) simply weren’t possible, according to the company. Banks and airlines have already shown interest in the possibility of letting users do their online banking and flight booking on the fly, says Macromedia. "It’s a new way to think about things," said company spokesman Dave Gruber. "There’s a growing level of excitement about what’s going to be possible with this." Worried about shipping sensitive banking information or booking multi-hundred-dollar flights from your thimble-sized cell phone? Gruber’s not. "As it turns out, SMPP is a deeply encrypted protocol… It’s very proven and has the deepest level of encryption available to it." Blackstone is no one-trick program either; Macromedia’s developers talked with users of past ColdFusion versions and got the skinny on what they felt CF and all other web-development apps were lacking. The number one hit they got was printability and savability; try to print a web page and you get chopped margins, bad page breaks and all the other chaos you can fit onto 8 ½ by 11 inches of paper. Trying to save one can often end up an ordeal tantamount to rebuilding the page yourself. "We saw this as a real opportunity and one that we could completely solve," says Gruber. Blackstone allows for PDFs and FlashPaper documents (Macromedia’s answer to PDF) to be built right into the page – no extra programs involved, no conversions. All the developer has to do is put a CFML tag, new with Blackstone, CFDOCUMENT, around any bit of HTML content and it instantly converts to either PDF or FlashPaper. "We typically call this our ‘standing-ovation’ feature because every time we show this to developers they’re really excited about both the power of what the end user gets to see out of this and as well how simple it is to create it," Gruber enthused. The next problem it tackles is data-entry forms and reports. Again Blackstone has created a new tag, CFFORM, which allows developers to create Flash Forms without the separate application. "It allows local validation, Flash widgets like drop-down grids, calendar controls and other things, to create a great UI for the end user, all without knowing anything about Flash," Gruber said. "ColdFusion does all the work for them." A separate version of the same tag allows developers to create XML-based forms, displayed in HTML, that can be re-skinned (have their visual appearance changed) without touching the business-logic code. "It allows a complete separation from business-logic and user-interface display for the form," added Gruber. Blackstone has a report-generator built in, based on the many expensive report-generating programs that exist separately already. But Blackstone, in a few lines of code, can create interactive reports, charts, graphs and forms that don’t just look like the rows and columns of an HTML table. With Blackstone, a bank’s web site could produce an online bank statement that actually looks like what’s spit out of an ATM, with the same ease as creating a table. In seconds, a site’s user can be making up pie charts like in Grade 10 math class. Less expensive than third-party reporting "Most of the customers for ColdFusion have not been able to afford to invest in expensive third-party reporting products like Crystal and others and even for those that have, they’ve told us that the ability to integrate this structured data display right in the application itself has a big benefit over these other enterprise reporting products." On the slightly geekier level, Blackstone makes multi-instance deployment fast and easy, allowing developers to create several instances of the application on the same server. Working from the idea that most site failures are software-based, Macromedia popped this in so that if the application fails, it automatically switches over to another isolated instance of it so the entire site doesn’t crash. This can also help high-traffic sites bear the load of their good fortune. The standard version ships for $1,299 US (though this one lacks the deployment and mobile features), the enterprise version for $5,999. "This release is really an in-your-face release for the end user… it’s not just about providing developers faster and easier ways to do things."

New Macromedia product promises easier content production for mobile devices

Broadcast | February 17, 2005

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