Web

Adobe Announces CoCoMo Platform as a Service

Josh Catone
Share

Though Flash Catalyst will undoubtedly be the talk of this year’s Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, as it was at least year’s gathering when it was demoed under the code name “Thermo,” Adobe is making plenty of other announcements surrounding their web development work flow at this week’s show. Most notably is the public release of another of last year’s demo products, CoCoMo, a service for RIA developers to add interactivity to their applications.

CoCoMo

CoCoMo is a hosted platform as a service that is essentially made up of the core components of the Acrobat Connect service. Connect is a web conferencing application that includes voice, video, chat, and screen sharing. CoCoMo deconstructs those core elements and offers them as a service to applications developers.

Over the past year, Adobe has debuted a number of software as a service application — such as the Buzzword word processing application, Photoshop Express, and the Adobe Share file sharing app. But to my knowledge, CoCoMo is their first platform as a service aimed squarely at developers.

CoCoMo will let developers plug chat, video, audio, and desktop sharing capabilities into their applications. The service will cost nothing to start and should be available on Adobe’s Labs site today.

Flex Gumbo

Adobe is also announcing the next version of Flex Builder, code named “Gumbo.” Gumbo extends Flex Builder to work better with the newly announced Flash Catalyst software, and adds new features that make it easier to create database centric applications. Gumbo also improves upon core components of Flex Builder, including the debugger, profiler and code editor. A preview build will be available for MAX 2008 attendees on Monday.

AIR 1.5

Also today at MAX, Adobe is shipping version 1.5 of their desktop RIA tool AIR. AIR 1.5 adds many of the features from Flash 10, which shipped about a month ago (our coverage), such as native 3D support, and improved text rendering. Perhaps the biggest change in AIR 1.5, though, is that it now incorporates the newest version of the open source WebKit rendering engine, which means that JavaScript performance has increased by 50%, according to Adobe, due to the SquirrelFish interpreter. Also new in AIR is an improved encrypted database for data security that aimed at meeting the stringent requirements of the enterprise.

AIR 1.5 is available today for Windows and Mac on the AIR web site. A Linux version is expected later this year.

Flash 10 for Linux

Linux was not forgotten at MAX this year, however. Adobe is making good on a promise to bring Flash 10 to 64-bit Linux, and will be offering a pre-release 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10 on Adobe Labs today.

Adobe will also be showing of a demo of Flash 10 for smart phones at MAX as part of their Open Screen Project.