Our Rich Media team recently attended an Adobe User Groups (AUG) tech tour for Adobe Flex 4 and ColdFusion. Needless to say, we were a bit cautious (given the word "ColdFusion" in the title). In a nutshell, ColdFusion is a commercial rapid application development tool for interfacing with databases through its own markup language, all bundled into one hefty-priced package from Adobe. Most of our Flash/Flex developers have experience interfacing with open-source tools and languages for pulling data, so naturally we were reluctant about this part of the presentation. Still, we wanted to hear about the new Flex 4 features. It was disappointing to say the least.  

First off, the presenter spoke for some time about a new tool called Flash Catalyst. It’s a tool for non-developers to use when designing interfaces. Hmmm...non-developers. Must mean designers. Do you really think ANY designer will give up Photoshop and Illustrator when it comes to designing web applications? Of course not. So basically, Adobe spent all this time making a tool no one will use and still have yet to address many of the problems with the Mac Flash CS4 IDE. I ask you: Why spend money on building new useless products when you could be fixing and improving on your top-selling ones? Flash CS4 on the Mac has so many problems we only use it when necessary. Help us, Adobe-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope (sorry — that was bad).

After designing a simple interface in Catalyst, the speaker opened it up in Flash Builder (the new Flex Builder) and published it. When I say simple, I mean VERY simple — one text field and one dropdown. One of our developers asked the speaker how big the file is. It’s a known fact that when creating a SWF from Flex, it adds in all the Flex overhead and is much larger than a SWF published from Flash. We were hoping this might be addressed in the latest Flash Builder application.

The file was 500k. The same piece published from Flash would have been about 30k. So unfortunately no, this was not addressed — yet another reason why we shouldn’t introduce Catalyst as a bridge between designers and developers. That same application could be built in Flash by a developer and much less expense in file size.

ColdFusion came up next and we were out the door. Honestly, the speaker knew very little about Flex 4 and integration with anything besides ColdFusion. This provided a very lopsided view of this new framework and thus didn’t help us much as far as learning about the true benefits of Flex 4 and the new Flash Builder IDE.

Adobe needs to stop focusing on tools that will get limited to no use. What we really want is to hear that Adobe is making their tried-and-true tools better.