The following is a short summary of what (little) I know of Adobe’s commitment to the cloud from the perspective of a developer.
2007 - AIR Bus Tour Toronto
I first learned about the cloud from a presentation on the Salesforce AIR toolkit. The audience was presented with a demo of an AIR application that did CRUD operations against the Contact table on Salesforce. Nothing special … until he pulled the network plug out of the laptop and performed CRUD ops without being connected. When he reconnected, the data that he manipulated locally was then syncronzed to the Salesforce cloud. No tweening balls here.
The next month, I had joined a company that did Salesforce customization. Little did I know the next few years I would be dealing with configuring an environment with the ease of not having having to deploy one.
The toolkit used in the demo is alive and well today:
http://developer.force.com/flextoolkit
We didn’t end up using it because of the amount of SOQL that had to exist on the client-side. Instead, we rolled out our own.
2009 - Flash Builder for the Force.com
Adobe hacks up a beta of Flash Builder to support an integrated development experience. Developers can take advantage of the Data Services tab and drag and drop webservices on to abused controls like the data grid. Pretty cool stuff. I ran through the demo but did not have an imediate need or a new project to apply this on.
2009 - Adobe MAX/RIA Unleashed Boston
Kevin Hoyt announces Adobe Flash Collaboration Services which would go on to be renamed as Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services. It was Flash Media Server with a hosted managed solution so that businesses did not have to worry about setting up supporting infrastructure.
Developers could sign up for a free account that allowed 15 minutes of real time collaboration.
I wish this existed 5 yrs ago when Java engineers we were working with were trying to push the limits of messaging for the in-game chat.
2010 - LCDS Managed!
This is awesome news. But what would be better news is if they made it cheaper. Last I checked, they made it even more expensive. Anyways, businesses now have an additional option of leveraging an Amazon cloud instances to run pre-configured LCDS instances.
I wanted to jump right into this today. The entry point is through Adobe LiveCycle Developer Express. Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ:
Q: How is a LiveCycle Managed Services deployment different than LiveCycle Developer Express?
A: LiveCycle Developer Express can be considered as a “sandbox in the cloud” for developers that want to develop their LiveCycle applications in the cloud rather than incur the costs of setting up a development environment on-premise. LiveCycle Developer Express is not intended for deployment of applications in production. In contrast, a LiveCycle Managed Services is intended for LiveCycle applications to be deployed in production in the cloud.
So I try to get my hands on something like an LCDS SDK and I run into this major obstacle that you have to be a paid member of AEDP, the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. This is a problem. A $1500USD problem!
This really blows. At least on Force.com, you can get a Developer account for like $0.00. They give you a pretty fair amount of liberties to play with. The only pitfall is that your app can be used like 10minutes a day at most.
Anyways here’s the links on today’s big news with LCDS and the cloud.
Deployment Info:
http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/cloud
Development Info:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/aedp/dev_exp/