CodFusion

So the big deal for the next version of CF is that it will support Tomcat. Right? Guess again.

So I had a twitter conversation with the Adobe CF product manager, Hemant Khandelwai yesterday and he admitted that the version of Tomcat they are planning to ship with CF10 will be a modified version that they are handling themselves. If you were planning to run CF on top of a vanilla Apache Tomcat install, then it will break several things like certain CGI variables and SES Urls. They are apparently submitting their modifications to the Apache Tomcat group but it's not certain they will accept the changes or in time for the release of CF10.

Just giving people a heads up on this in case you ddin't know. Naturally, I'm not happy with this situation, but hopefully Apache will accept the mods in time. 

Just when things look to be calming down at Adobe, Deepa from the Flex SDK team just made a blog post which makes the following statement:

"we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi"

So it appears they may throw Flex to an open source foundation like PhoneGap. I wonder which one would even want it at this point given the very limited future of Flash technology. Even though several of us in the development community had asked for this, at this point, it feels a bit too little, too late. I suspect Flash Builder may get dropped soon as a result or at least moved into another product/direction.  They haven't said that yet, but it would make sense if the Flex framework was being put out to pasture.

If you haven't watch Adobe's last Earnings Call yet and you're using Flash/Flex/AIR, you should.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/11q3analyst/earnings_confcall.html

As many know, I've been very critical of Adobe management over their handling of CF, Flash, Flex and AIR. During the last earnings call in the "Closing Comments" and the "Content Authoring" sections, Shantanu seems to finally be coming around to my view of the situation. There has been some editing of the remarks since the live broadcast but the main points are still there. They are..

- the shifting landscape is favoring HTML5

- Adobe is a tooling company

- Adobe is doubling down on it's investment with HTML5 work on tools like Muse and Edge and the engines like WebKit.

I'll be one of the first to say, that it was really refreshing to see Shantanu come out and finally say this. I've been pushing for these points for some time now. Unfortunately due to the groupthink within the community and the lack of direction from Adobe, they have lost a ton of time in mapping out this new path. Doubling down may not be enough, but at least they seem to be looking in the right direction. Adobe is a tooling company. Tools like Photoshop, Lightroom and Dreamweaver are where the company really shines. That's their strength. Language and protocol development has had some good moments, but it's not something that the company really understands or knows how to develop and market. 

What does this mean for Flash? Well, if you're a developer and you want the greatest possible reach for your content, Flash simply isn't the answer. It's time for everyone to acknowledge that. There might be a small chance that the technology will survive in the AIR realm and in making apps, but that's far from certain and they have a lot of work left to do with that. Native, in the browser, content is still king and that's not going to change anytime soon. Hey, it's been around 15 years. It was a great run. Flash won't disappear overnight and HTML5 is far from perfect or even a set standard, but things are moving in a certain direction and Adobe can't fight that. If they stick to what they do best, things will work out just fine.

Now I can only hope they also make similar changes in their policy of sending jobs overseas and then asking for a tax break in the process and how they're handling CF. They could be a far stronger company with some simple changes but in the meantime this was a positive step forward.