The increasing integration of Adobe and former Macromedia products continues with Creative Suite 3, which is available in a version targeted specifically to Web developers and designers. Designers today - whether they started in an era of X-acto knives and border tape or have recently graduated with a degree in digital design - must have at least a nodding acquaintance with the various strains of code that underlies their work. Yet the tools have long been powerful enough that they don't have to consider themselves to be programmers.

Already, even in pre-release, Adobe's Spry seemed to catch the imagination of many Web professionals wrestling with how to integrate new AJAX frameworks into existing workflows. Created with designers in mind, Spry uses regular HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript, and is easy to use - boiling down to a couple of JavaScript libraries that you include in your Web page in order to be in a position to add dynamic interactive content to your site.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

Digital content is exploding; video on the Web is booming; Web 2.0 is hurtling toward us; and Adobe believes 'engagement' is the one word that best captures its strategy and encapsulates the competitive advantage that its fast-expanding product set gives to the developers and designers who use it.

Once upon a time, Sun and Apple used to have about the same market cap. Today Apple has a market cap of $63BN while Sun's is just $17BN. Ahead of Sun, unbeknownst to many, is Adobe. Its market cap today is $18BN. For a company that in 1998 was worth 'only' $1.7BN it has not been a bad 8 years!

The winds of change in the Web world have reached hurricane force right now, and nowhere are they blowing more fiercely than around that epicenter of weather activity that's been labeled 'Web 2.0.' There, a perfect storm is brewing.

The current storm of change in Web development and online business models, coming as it does together with a simultaneous revolution in the way that users are choosing to use the Web, is an opportunity for us all.

'Seems like a lot going on here,' wrote John Dowdell; 'The place is pretty packed. Geeks mingled with suits; some of the geeks IN suits,' wrote Flash guru Jesse Randall Warden. 'Loooots of demos. And that's exactly what I came for,' wrote arpit. The blogosphere has been giving its early verdict on SYS-CON Events' 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar...and the overwhelming verdict would seem to be that it was a hit.

The advisability of eating in your own kitchen is something you often hear about, but never does it make more sense than when applied in the world of software development. Why accept that service-oriented architecture is a must for your mission-critical backend systems, for example, if you find that the developer recommending such a trajectory does not personally make use of SOA?

One of the 'inflexion points' of the development of the Web, when commentators and analysts draw breath for long enough to chronicle its history, is certain to be the day that Google, through first Gmail and then Google Maps, opened the eyes of millions to the fact that the Web can be smarter, more responsive, and interactive...above all, that it doesn't have to involve 'click, wait, and refresh.'

A week is a long time in politics,' they always say; but a week in the world of technology is - on occasion - longer than anyone ever imagined. This week's MAX, for example, where many of you will have picked up this month's issue, may seem to rush by - with its sure-to-be-packed sessions by MXDJ and ColdFusion Developer's Journal regulars like Ray Camden, Alexandru Costin, Ben Forta, Simon Horwith, and Stephanie Sullivan, in addition to a whole host of other MX stars.

On April 18, 2005, as we all know, Adobe Systems Incorporated announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. This is a look back, sideways, and forwards, based on what's been happening since then.

The same is true of the technology world. But nonetheless let us play a very simple guessing game: what technology was this well-known writer talking about when he recently wrote about how 'a technology that started out as nothing more than an animation program has morphed into a powerful real-time information delivery tool that can access data across the Web, read from and update databases, act as the front end for complex Web applications, and even run as a desktop program free from the constraints of a Web browser'?

In the world or architecture, as many of the designers among MX Developer's Journal's readership are well aware, there's a wonderfully erudite theory, with a equally wonderfully dumb name: Bigness.