Roundup of Adobe announcements last week

Adobe made a bunch of announcements yesterday that I couldn't do justice because I was at OSCON. A lot of them are from Kevin Lynch's keynote speech at the Ajax Experience but we also had a couple of others. Ajaxian had a great writeup of Kevin's keynote that is well worth checking out.

Video in Ajax and the new Ajax Dev Center
Adobe is really embracing Ajax and is doing a lot to help that community. Kevin announced the availability of the Flash Ajax Video Component (FAVideo) which is now on labs and is an open source component that you can drop into an Ajax application to add Flash video. What's great is that the component makes all of the controls and design side available so that you can customize the look and feel of the player using only HTML and JavaScript. Essentially you don't need to know anything about Flash to give your site a branded video experience. We've also created an Ajax Developer center that provides a lot of resources for Ajax developers who want to work with Adobe technologies. I think it's going to be a great bridge between the Flash world and the Ajax world.

Standardization of crossdomain.xml
Also at the Ajax Experience we announced that we're going to try and make our cross-domain policy files a standard. Flash uses these files to check whether or not the player is allowed to access the content on the server. It gives the people hosting data the ability to make certain contents off limit. With the swell of mashups and more and more data being made available, we wanted to step up and provide our solution. More can be found on the cross-domain file here.

The SWF and FLV File Format Specification Available
We also released the spec for version 9 of SWF and FLV last week. People have been wanting this for a while and in the blog post Emmy promised that we're going to try hard to make the next version available much closer to the player release. Hopefully we'll see more external support for creating Flash 9 content now that this has been released.

ColdFusion 8 Released
Today we announced that ColdFusion 8 is available. It's been a lot of fun watching this product evolve this year. I came from a ColdFusion background and I think 8 is a great release. We've put in a lot of support for Ajax in this release and also support for closer integration to Flex. I think it's a big jump in functionality and I hope it's well received by the web developer community.