Adobe is aligning its Web design and developer tools, including a new one available for testing Monday, under its Flash brand to emphasize the heart of its strategy to give developers everything they need to build RIAs.
Adobe FlexBuilder is being rebranded as Adobe FlashBuilder to alleviate some confusion developers had about the software and to emphasize the importance of the Flash brand and technology, said Adobe group marketing manager David Gruber during a recent meeting in New York. FlashBuilder is a tool that allows developers to work with design code
“There’s been some confusion in the marketplace about the Flex brand,” he said.
This confusion stems from the existence of another offering, the Flex framework, which is free software for building applications for either the Flash player running in a browser or the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) running on a desktop, Gruber said. FlexBuilder, on the other hand, is a commercially sold toolset for building RIAs using Flash and other technologies.
“We’re up-leveling the Flash brand and … trying to get this out in front of people early so people can see what we’re doing,” Gruber said.
On Monday, Adobe will release betas of version 4 of both of those products, as well as the beta for another Flash-centric tool, Adobe Flash Catalyst. Catalyst is a new tool that helps bridge the gap between designers and developers so a rich Internet application as conceived by a designer has the best chance of being developed that way on the back end, Gruber said.
Catalyst previously went by the code name Thermo, but was named in November at Adobe’s developer conference.
