Kevin Hoyt

I find pretty regularly that developers tend to confuse Adobe and Flash. Adobe is a company. Flash is a technology. Flash is just one of the 70+ technologies that Adobe, the company, makes. JavaScript developers that ignore the rest of what Adobe has to offer because of its association with Flash, do themselves a great disservice. As a point in case, Adobe is sponsoring and presenting at the two most well known Ajax conferences this year.

The first conference is The Ajax Experience in Boston, MA on September 29 through October 1. I’ll be present at this conference to introduce the framework summits for jQuery, Dojo and Prototype. While there I’ll be presenting two sessions; one on what’s new in Dreamweaver CS4 and the other on getting started building your first application with Adobe AIR. I also have an interview scheduled with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer to talk about everything from “Flex versus Ajax” to “open source Flash.” Adobe will also be recording all of the 50+ sessions for redistribution.

Although certainly not as large an event, I’ll also be at jQuery Conference the preceding Sunday. I’m excited to learn more about jQuery, but I’ll also be there to show off my latest application called “What Now” and talk about how jQuery and Adobe AIR made it possible. While I’m still refining the application (yes, with only a few days to go), here’s an early sneak peak at one of the screens. The application includes features such as custom chrome, running as a background process, system notifications, local data storage, network availability detection and more.

The second major conference at which you’ll find Adobe, the company, is the AJAXWorld RIA Conference. I won’t be at AJAXWorld this time around, my first time missing the conference in a few years, but another Kevin will be on hand to give a keynote presentation - Kevin Lynch, CTO at Adobe. I’m not going to spill the beans about Kevin’s presentation, but he doesn’t like to take the stage without having an announcement to make.

To my earlier point, the reason for Adobe being at these conferences isn’t about converting JavaScript developers to Flash. The reason is that Adobe has a mission to change the way people engage with ideas and information. We have runtimes, tools, servers and services to facilitate every aspect of that mission for every type of designer and developer. On the JavaScript side of the house this might mean everything from Adobe’s involvement in Tamarin (let’s not forget where all these speed improvements in JavaScript are coming from), Dreamweaver CS4 with amazing new CSS and JavaScript features, to ColdFusion’s most excellent Ajax forms and JSON support, to emerging efforts like Adobe Share with its REST API.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under AIR, Ajax, JavaScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.