CFDJ: The biggest news of the year for Allaire and Macromedia is the merger. What are the reasons for uniting these two companies?
Lynch: The merger of Macromedia and Allaire mirrors what's happening in Web development today. Creating the best user experience on the Web requires the combination of server-side Web application logic with client-side user interface, and team members with expertise in these areas need to work together effectively to succeed. I believe this merger is really about the marriage of two user communities, bringing the developers and designers together so they can more easily build the Web sites of tomorrow.

We also see the nature of the Internet changing as users access Web content and applications through a range of devices. This poses many challenges for developers and designers, and we want to help them be successful in delivering great user experiences across all these devices in an efficient way. It's exciting to bring these communities together, to join world-class teams with the background and experience necessary to enable this.

Allaire: This merger is as much about the specific synergies and opportunities created by combining Allaire and Macromedia as it is about a broader set of trends in the development of the Web, such as the emergence of teams of Web professionals that span a wide range of skill sets, tools, and technologies, and need to come together to deliver great Web sites and great user experiences. It's about combining dynamic content with visual authoring, and delivering Web applications to multiple devices. It's about creating the next generation of user experiences, going beyond the limitations of current Web standards. No software company has ever really combined the world of content with the world of logic and programming, and we think we're creating something special and unique.

CFDJ: So what's the geographical spread now?
Lynch: Both Macromedia and Allaire have offices around the world. Macromedia already has product development teams located in San Francisco, Dallas, and Minneapolis, and of course this merger now adds the Boston location.

CFDJ: It seems to me this rapid evolution could confuse the marketplace. Is there a uniform message Macromedia/Allaire want to send out to the Web community?
Lynch: Our mission continues to be to enable our customers to deliver the best experiences on the Web. Basically we'll have an even greater group of development teams working for our customers to help them succeed in leading Web development.

The products our customers know and love will become even stronger when combined with Allaire's server-side capabilities. A number of new solutions will emerge for our customers as the teams innovate together on supporting multiple Web devices, Web services, dynamic publishing, team collaboration, and future key trends. We'll continue to make sure that our software will be the best available and appropriately designed for each customer audience.

The server strategy is exciting for our customers, as together we'll be providing the most approachable way to develop dynamic Web content and applications and deploy them across industry-standard application servers, such as JRun or IBM WebSphere, and to integrate with services through Microsoft .NET. This will enable Web developers to easily and quickly create the best dynamic Web experiences and deliver them across a range of platforms.

CFDJ: Your company now offers a large array of products. Can you briefly list what the existing products are for the benefit of our readers?
Lynch: Our combined company will have leading products in three main categories. The first is centered around the Dreamweaver platform, which is used by over 70% of Web professionals for Web site development and includes products such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks, HomeSite, UltraDev, ColdFusion and JRun Studios, and Kawa. The second product line is based around the Macromedia Flash player, which delivers high-impact experiences to over 300 million people around the world, with content being developed with Flash, FreeHand, and Director, as well as the Flash player and the higher-end Shockwave player. As Web experiences built with these products are integrating with server-side application logic, this leads to our group of server products - ColdFusion, JRun, Spectra, and Generator. The combination of these products enables Web professionals to create the best Web experiences in the world in the most efficient way.

Alaire: Allaire is known for solutions such as ColdFusion, a popular, rapid Web application development and deployment product. JRun is a popular J2EE ser-ver known for its ease of use, affordability, and great flexibility. We also have a server product called Spectra, which is a dynamic publishing tool. Finally, we sell a few different visual development tools, including HomeSite, a popular HTML editor; the Studio products, which provide rich IDEs for server-side scripting with CFML and JSP; and Kawa, a simple yet powerful Java IDE focused on ser-ver-side Java development.

CFDJ: In any merger, overlaps in technology and products are inevitable. What overlaps do you see in your combined company and what are your plans for eliminating them? What integration challenges are you facing?
Allaire: Interestingly, there are few real overlaps here. For example, we obviously don't provide rich media and graphics products, nor does Macromedia provide application serving software. With the visual Web development tools we've had fundamentally different approaches to the market, reflecting different types of customers. Whereas Dreamweaver and UltraDev focused on visual authoring of HTML and dynamic applications, HomeSite, Studio, and Kawa focused exclusively on code-centric development. By bringing the world of design and the world of programming or development together, we'll really see some fantastic things. Specifically, how we'll package our visual tools, our ser-ver products, or other potential new products we're leaving to our product groups who we've empowered to build solutions that reflect the diverse needs of our now very diverse customers.

CFDJ: What is the road map going forward?
Lynch: We're committed to delivering on the dreams of the Allaire and Macromedia customers, and are working hard to provide the tools and technology for them to be successful. As we develop the next generation of Web development software, you'll see great, new, innovative capabilities for building dynamic Web sites that result from the cross-pollination of the Allaire and Macromedia teams, as well as even deeper integration across our product lines.

In the short term we're really excited about delivering the next major release of our servers, which builds a wide range of functionality on top of the J2EE architecture. This includes next generations of the ColdFusion and JRun technologies, as well as a next-generation application framework technology based on Spectra, Generator, and other server technologies. We'll continue to enable teams of Web professionals to work together more productively, and lead the cutting edge of user experiences and applications with the Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players.

CFDJ: This year it seems the application server vendors are continuing their move toward being "one-stop shops" for all B2B2C frameworks. I think you're stepping away from that. Obviously your strength is in the front end and the presentation side of the middle-tier technologies. What would you say is unique about what your company offers?
Allaire: Macromedia will be the first and only large software company focused exclusively on the needs of Web professionals. We'll be the first Web software company to provide products that support the needs of every type of professional involved in delivering a great Web site or Web application. We'll be one of the only companies that combines a rich, client-side technology (the Flash player) with great authoring and development tools and a simple, affordable server platform. We're also unique in that we're deeply committed to building open software that spans and works with other vendor platforms, whether it's Microsoft's .NET or Sun's J2EE, or whether it's deploying our server solutions on JRun or on our partners' servers, such as BEA, IBM, and Sun.

I'd also agree that our strength is in the front end of the Web application world. There are strong companies, many of them our partners, who have built great products for enterprise application integration, transaction and messaging infrastructure that reach very deep into the enterprise, and provide a level of enterprise scalability that we're not as focused on.

Given this focus, I don't think you're likely to see us try and build vertical products that target customers who are not Web professionals, such as solutions packaged for supply-chain integration, B2B marketplaces, retail and merchandising frameworks, and large-scale process integration. However, we definitely plan to expand the range of application services beyond the basic serving infrastructure necessary for delivering great Web sites and applications.

CFDJ: Does Allaire/Macromedia plan to get into actual application design, that is, step into industry verticals, or always be application enablers? Or do you plan to continue expansion in horizontal technology offerings?
Lynch: We're focused on enabling Web professionals build the best Web sites and user experiences in the world, and that's the community we'll continue to serve.

CFDJ: What does this merger mean for the development communities, specifically the ColdFusion, Spectra, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Java developers?

Allaire: I think across the board this is going to create great opportunities for developers using all these platforms. For ColdFusion, JSP, and Java developers, they can count on having fantastic visual development tools that cover both basic and advanced development. For Macromedia Flash customers, they'll be able to more easily take advantage of servers for the dynamic delivery of content and provide full application functionality. Spectra customers can look forward to better tools to create the building blocks of a dynamic publishing application. Also, all these customers can expect that we're going to try and put together technology that supports their work as a team, creating a better production workflow in how people build increasingly complex sites and applications.

CFDJ: At Allaire, initiatives to integrate CF and Java have already begun. How are these progressing? What is the strategy to make CF available in a J2EE environment?
Allaire: This is definitely one of our highest priorities and one of the most exciting things happening this year. We announced a project code named Neo last fall, which we demonstrated at our developer conference. Neo enables developers to build dynamic page applications using CFML - easily the most accessible and rapid development environment for Web applications - and to deploy those applications on a standard J2EE server. This is also about a higher degree of interoperability between CFML and JSP, and that's going to be important to Java developers as well. This whole project is going great, and you can expect to hear a lot more about this later this year.

CFDJ: How is Spectra affected? Where does it fit in with the existing Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver and Flash?
Lynch: Spectra is focused on helping Web developers create dynamically published Web sites, and this will become an increasingly important capability as Web sites evolve. We see many opportunities to integrate with Dreamweaver, Flash, and all our products to help create these dynamic Web sites.

CFDJ: Some of the clients I've spoken to view Dreamweaver and ColdFusion as alternatives for a presentation layer. What's your view on this? Is there an overlap?
Lynch: These products are very complementary - I don't see any overlap since one system authors HTML and the other is a server technology.

CFDJ: How do you plan to address enterprise-level concerns such as scalability, robustness, and security?
Allaire: First, we're fully committed to providing server products that are robust, that scale, and can be performance tuned, clustered, and easily managed. However, that's very different from providing the full infrastructure necessary for large-scale, distributed transaction systems that integrate with large legacy systems, provide end-to-end security, and more. For example, we don't plan to focus on providing transactional application integration software, certificate and directory servers for security, or to go into the systems management business. These are all enterprise domains with strong companies that are our partners. I would expect that customers using our software would want to take advantage of these products and partners for a range of capabilities.

CFDJ: With Spectra, you've introduced a workflow environment that fits in the domain of business roles and synchronous workflows. How does this map to back-end workflow products, such as HP ChangeEngine, WebLogic Process Integrator, and Tibco's workflow product?
Allaire: These other products are great solutions for people building large-scale distributed systems, systems that integrate lots of back-office applications, systems across the Internet, and large enterprises. That's also a great market, but is not something we're focused on. Spectra's workflow engine is geared toward the front-end processes involved in managing a Web site rather than back-end process integration.

CFDJ: Do you have any offerings in the wireless market?
Lynch: Yes, we're working to help Web professionals deliver great experiences on mobile devices. We're working to get the Macromedia Flash player onto these devices and have recently announced the developer release of the player for the PocketPC, which is available for download from our Web site. We're also working to support authoring content for these devices, and recently worked with Nokia to produce the WML Studio extensions to Dreamweaver, which are available on the Macromedia Exchange (www.macromedia.com/exchange/).

Allaire: Today, Allaire has support for HDML and WML in our visual tools, and we have a free developer-oriented WAP gateway that you can download and use with JRun (it's actually a servlet). We've also spent a lot of time helping customers understand how to build wireless applications more easily using the dynamic content capabilities of our servers.

CFDJ: Does XML fit anywhere into your technology blueprint?
Lynch: Yes, we believe XML is becoming a basic building block of Web sites, and we're supporting it in many ways across our products from authoring to players. For example, the Macromedia Flash Player 5 now supports XML content that streams directly into Flash content.

Allaire: At this point, XML is pervasive across our products. Our visual tools support extensibility through an XML model; they support working with new XML vocabularies. Our servers provide support for parsing XML and transforming XML with XSLT, and use XML internally for metadata. Spectra uses XML for content-object persistence and content syndication. As I've mentioned, support for Web services protocols built on XML is central to our future platform.

CFDJ: For ColdFusion developers who are not familiar with Macromedia products, where's a good place to start incorporating them into existing applications?
Allaire: One of the most exciting places they can start doing this is with Macromedia Flash. Flash expands what you can do with user interfaces on the Web, and with Flash 5 it's much easier to connect to ColdFusion using HTTP and XML, building real applications. We've put together something called the Flash UI Kit for ColdFusion that provides information on what Flash can do. It has a library of six UI controls (trees, menus, calendars, etc.) that can be put in a page using CFML tags and will be available from www.macromedia.com. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible.

CFDJ: Are there any white papers or technology briefings that tell the whole story about how all the products interact and integrate? Similar to the J2EE Blueprints from Sun? Do you plan to have these in the near future?
Lynch: The teams are currently working on the integration - I encourage you to attend the Macromedia User Conference in New York City, April 10-12, for more details. Registration information is available at www.macromedia.com.
ajit@sys-con.com