Adobe is buying Macromedia
This is a very interesting merger, and it totally makes sense.
1. Adobe gets Dreamweaver, which is way more advanced than Go Live, in my limited experience.
2. Adobe gets Fireworks to integrate into ImageReady. I’ve never really used Fireworks, but I’m told that it makes common web graphics a lot easier.
3. Adobe now controls PDF >and< Flash.
And, possibly most importantly:
4. Adobe has been doing a lot of dynamic PDF generation with J2EE. Macromedia has Coldlfusion/JRun. I think, but I’m not sure, that I smell a really kickass CMS brewing here that integrates directly with Adobe’s image server. Moreover, it may be what I’ve been waiting for from Adobe for years – print and web output from the same system, and a web-based interactive system for editing content for print publications based on InDesign (or similar) templates.
http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/04/18/adobe.to.buy.macromedia/
IBM has been working on techniques for combining PDF and XML documents via J2EE:
I’ve put together a possible pretty simple flow diagram for #4:
http://www.visiognomy.com/diagrams/archives/2005/04/18/adobe-is-buying-macromedia/
