NextGen Macromedia Flash Tool "Zorn" to Run on Eclipse

June 16, 2005 2:15 PM

NextGen Macromedia Flash Tool "Zorn" to Run on Eclipse• "Macromedia's announcement that their next generation enterprise Flash development tool, code-named Zorn, will be built on top of Eclipse, is a watershed moment both for Macromedia and for the open source movement. Macromedia's choice of Eclipse speaks volumes about the impact of open source on commercial software development -- and about Macromedia's commitment to making Flash into an essential platform for next-generation internet applications." </glavin>
posted by dhoyt (16 comments total)

Good grief. I just noticed this "news" was ten days old. Sorry, it was the first I'd heard of it, and I figured a lot of MeFites would be interested.
posted by dhoyt at 2:20 PM on June 16, 2005

This *is* big news, and it was news to me. So thanks, dhoyt.

I guess that Macromedia really has given up on the original promise of Flash -- make cool interactivity, no developer needed. Admittedly, this is a much more challenging goal. And any solution is bound to please nobody (mom and pop because they can't "really" make what they want and mr. developer because it's a sandbox without real power). But saying that your authoring environment will run on Eclipse is sealing forever any claim of being "scripting for everyone."

I think it's a good move, since there's so many fewer mom and pops building anything in flash (and so many more craigslist postings that say things like "please fix my flash movie!!! $100"). But it's a big departure for them. I guess this is their answer to ajax -- aim at developers who are thinking about jumping ship to python, ruby, etc.
posted by zpousman at 2:28 PM on June 16, 2005

in other news, macromedia's fully certified J2EE implementation, JRun 4, continues to deliver commercial grade quality for just $899 per CPU!
posted by quonsar at 2:45 PM on June 16, 2005

quonsar writes "in other news, macromedia's fully certified J2EE implementation, JRun 4, continues to deliver commercial grade quality for just $899 per CPU!"

hehe... JRun is the application that convinced me that Macromedia should stick to making graphics-generation apps.
posted by clevershark at 3:13 PM on June 16, 2005

Eclipse sucks.

Perhaps its the best if you are too cheap to buy a real IDE, or cant figure out emacs, but if thats the case why are you writing software in the 1st place?

IBM knew that the "goodwill to OS community" was worth more than their POS development environment.
posted by H. Roark at 3:17 PM on June 16, 2005

Since we already know that Adobe will swallow up Macromedia, and that job 1 at Adobe for the past 3 years has been to develop copy protection at the expense of improving the products, I'm skeptical that a new Eclipse-based tool will survive once John Warnock starts calling the shots directly.
posted by clevershark at 3:24 PM on June 16, 2005

Ah, Flash changing its scripting language again. That is big news indeed.
posted by kika at 3:34 PM on June 16, 2005

Changing its scripting language? What are you talking about?
posted by ericost at 4:05 PM on June 16, 2005

that job 1 at Adobe for the past 3 years has been to develop copy protection at the expense of improving the products

Not an InDesign or RAW format digital camera user I gather?
posted by juiceCake at 4:07 PM on June 16, 2005

News to me, too. Cheers!
posted by blendor at 4:51 PM on June 16, 2005

Finally, an exception to my usual rule of seeking out anything with the word 'Zorn' on it.
posted by box at 5:13 PM on June 16, 2005

hehe... JRun is the application that convinced me that Macromedia should stick to making graphics-generation apps.

JRun works fine, and ColdFusion (the J2EE app used by MeFi) works fine on top of it, if they are both configured properly. There's a lot of server tuning involved in this. I can point to all sorts of high-volume, high-availability systems running on ColdFusion.

I guess that Macromedia really has given up on the original promise of Flash -- make cool interactivity, no developer needed. Admittedly, this is a much more challenging goal. And any solution is bound to please nobody (mom and pop because they can't "really" make what they want and mr. developer because it's a sandbox without real power). But saying that your authoring environment will run on Eclipse is sealing forever any claim of being "scripting for everyone."

It's my understanding that Macromedia will continue to make the Flash IDE for designers. Zorn will take the place of FlexBuilder, which is a customized version of Dreamweaver used to build Flex applications. Flex is a server-side Flash generation engine written in Java, and it like ColdFusion can run on JRun. Flex applications aren't written in the same way as traditional Flash animations or applications at all, but rather are written using a combination of ActionScript and an XML language called MXML which describes the presentation layer as containers and controls. Moving to Eclipse is good, because FlexBuilder blows goats.

I think it's a good move, since there's so many fewer mom and pops building anything in flash (and so many more craigslist postings that say things like "please fix my flash movie!!! $100"). But it's a big departure for them. I guess this is their answer to ajax -- aim at developers who are thinking about jumping ship to python, ruby, etc.

Flash Remoting and Flex were the answers to AJAX before we called it AJAX. I'm not convinced they're a necessarily better approach, but Macromedia has been chasing this market since Flash 5 came out.
posted by me & my monkey at 5:43 PM on June 16, 2005

One day, as Eclipse ate it's own metadata for the fifth time, I had a realization.

It was that point, after I fired up vim and tried emacs desperate for any closure, after the blood rage had lifted from my eyes, and after the spittle had dried on my lips; even after my supplications went unheeded by those deceitful gods, it was only then I realized the truth-

a half an hour stretched into 8 hours...
Eclipse sucks donkey ballz
posted by kuatto at 9:26 PM on June 16, 2005

Sigh, I guess I'll have to be the sacrificial lamb here...

I work on a development team of a 2 mil. LOC financial services app. We have been using Eclipse since the 2.0.1 after switching from VisualCafe.

Between the refactoring support, code visualization features, just in time compile, top grade debugger and excellent extension capability (PDE) Eclipse is as good or better than best of breed commercial IDE's.

Additionally, the current team has been very responsive about bug fixes. In fact, if you use Eclipse and notice that the open type dialog can now filter by working sets, you can thank me for bugging the IBM dev in Zurich to get it in :-)

Plus, even when it doesn't work just right, its very easy to download and rebuild. For a long time Eclipse had a stoopid 25 step limit on undo'ing. All that meant was that I downloaded the source release, changed a DefaultUndoManager(25) to DefaultUndoManager(2500), recompiled and distributed to the team. Try that in any of the commercial IDE's, I dare ya.

So yeah, does Eclipse have warts? Sure, especially if you want to use the latest features and stay up to date the Milestone 3.1 releases. But, it's been getting better and better with every release, takes alot of stooopid out of Java development, and truly encourages community involvement.

If you can't get behind that, then your just too much of a crumedgeon for me.

For serious developers of rich interactive Flash applications, this is great news.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 11:02 PM on June 16, 2005

I can point to all sorts of high-volume, high-availability systems running on ColdFusion.

...and MetaFilter's one of them??

Seriously, I completely agree. I'm a CF developer (well, my time is split between CF and ASP.NET), and I've never had any problems with any of my apps on JRun. Makes me wonder what's going on at the glitzy MeFi datacenter sometimes...
posted by NeonSurge at 1:49 AM on June 17, 2005

Eclipse may be great, but it's code completion stuff is sligtly diffrent then Jbuilder's which I have been using for years. JBuilder is a buggy POS but I'm so used to it. Help!

Also, eclipse dosn't have swing or even Wx gui designers, which would be nice.

Finaly, JRun is only as good as the code you run on it.
posted by delmoi at 9:45 AM on June 17, 2005