Adobe has a strong vision on how the future world wide web should work, and their offering goes with a rather chunky title “Adobe Engagement Platform” (later on AEP). In short, this is a merger of Flash, PDF and HTML/XHTML/XML to provide rich internet applications (later on RIA) that could run with predictable results across all browsers and devices.

Adobe’s expectations from the new platform are huge - everything with display screen could (and most likely will) run Adobe’s offering in some scale.

Engagement platform’s architecture is build on four pieces:

• Adobe Apollo - a browser independent, universal client application with Adobe Reader and Flash Player support.
  The pre-release version of Adobe Apollo will be available this year while Apollo 1.0 is expect in 2007. Apollo Version 1.0 will run on desktops while the future releases will support mobile devices.
• Server-side components
  Adobe LiveCycle is Adobe’s solution to electronic XML-based forms. Adobe Flex (currently in version 2.0) is a development platform for rich internet applications. Adobe FlashCast and Flash Media Server enable real-time video streaming,on deman video conferencing etc. advanced features.
• Application architecture frameworks
  ActionScript 3.0 is the new powerful version of programming language used by Flash with very tight integration to Flex and other AEP technologies.

  MXML is an XML-based language used by Flex to define graphical user interfaces and integrate these to web services / business events.

Development tools
Adobe / Macromedia Studio and Adobe Creative Suite will still be a cornerstone for most creative workers.

For more serious development use, Flex (Builder) will play a major role as the main tool on developing RIA applications. For the time being, for most developers the question of Flex / Flash interoperability (for example will Flex 2 components be available in Flash 9) is a serious concern.

It must also be noted, that Adobe is not the only player targeting this market. For example Microsoft is on the move with their Expression, and there are tens of smaller players (like Laszlo / OpenLaszlo) that target for RIA markets.

Stay tuned as future posts will go trough AEP structure step by step, and evaluate it’s meaning to mobile application / software development.