That's right, there's a whole lotta shaking going on - in the IT world, that is. Macromedia's Studio MX 2004 suite of products has now begun shipping, and the reviews are in! In addition to the suite, Macromedia Central has entered the public limelight with the public beta release having been launched. Not all of the news comes from Macromedia. SYS-CON Media, the folks who bring you ColdFusion Developer's Journal each month, have now launched MX Developer's Journal - a magazine aimed at covering the entire range of MX products.

Rather than examining a specific CFDJ List thread this month, I'm going to examine the overall discussion topic trends and buzz that's a result of the new suite of products.

First of all, I'll begin by saying, "shame on you" to anyone out there who has not yet picked up a copy of Studio MX 2004. Without a doubt, this is the finest suite of development products on the market. Each individual product is worlds superior to its predecessors. Macromedia has also given us material proof that their vision of how development tools will look, feel, and integrate with each other really works. Hats off to the Macromedia product development teams - they've outdone themselves!

There have been many reviews of the suite - all of which are good. Those of you who are looking for reasons to purchase or upgrade to Studio MX 2004 or who are trying to convince your boss to do so, should look to these articles and reviews for compelling reasons to do so. To name a few, PC Magazine gave a stellar review (www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1275209,00.asp) and Forrester Research gave the new suite very good marks as well (www.macromedia.com/homepage/forrester.pdf). Flash MX 2004 also won a CNET Editor's Choice Award in August 2003.

Macromedia also just released the public beta of Central, the new offline/online Flash Application-based browser. For those of you who haven't yet seen it, Central is a very slick new product release from Macromedia, aimed at testing experimental waters. Essentially Central is a browser. Rather than browsing the Web though, Central runs Flash applets (mini applications) within its window. These Flash applications communicate with the Web via Web services in order to retrieve data in real time and for offline viewing, and to allow end users to interact with other server-side functionality. The mini Flash apps not only have the ability to store data for offline viewing, but also have the ability to exchange data with each other. This allows you to do things like export an address book entry from a Flash e-mail inbox to a calendar application, or download the morning news for offline viewing later.

The tighter integration of the MX suite of products and the new product features that together represent Macromedia's vision of how Web developers will work to "get things done," has resulted in an increase of threads on CFDJ List and other list servers, centered around use of non-CF products. No surprise, these threads usually relate to the new features in Dreamweaver MX 2004.

ColdFusion MX 6.1 has also made a huge impact on the discussion topics across the board. This release, which was not officially part of the MX 2004 Studio release but is included in Studio MX 2004, addressed many of the concerns and shortcomings of the original MX release. Among many other enhancements, the installation process and server performance is now superb, and many of the ColdFusion Component Architecture shortcomings have been addressed.

This is not recent news, but a noticeable trend is that developers are beginning to take advantage of the underlying J2EE architecture. Never before have there been so many posts asking questions about Java development topics. There has also been a large number of threads about the ability to run ColdFusion as a J2EE application and about how to configure multiple J2EE server instances.

In my article last month, I explained that ColdFusion should be seen more as an ideal way to develop Java applications, and the trend of J2EE topics on CFDJ List indicates that this is indeed the attitude developers are beginning to adopt.

MAX, Macromedia's conference in Salt Lake City, Utah (November 18-21) - where you may be reading this - replaces the conferences formerly known as UCON and DevCon, and is creating a lot of buzz. The session topics scheduled for MAX also reflect both the thinking of ColdFusion as a J2EE development environment and, very much, the integration of Studio MX 2004 products. Macromedia has categorized the sessions by experience level (www.macromedia.com/macromedia/conference/schedule/by_level/) and by track (www.macromedia.com/macromedia/conference/schedule/by_track/).

Taking a look at the tracks and the sessions that fall within, there's "Client Side Development," which focuses mostly on Flash but also on Central and Dreamweaver development topics; "Design," which focuses primarily on Dreamweaver but also includes Central, FreeHand, and Contribute topics; "Experience Matters," which focuses on RIA development; and "Server Side Development," which is overwhelmingly ColdFusion topics but also includes PHP and .NET topics.

You will also find several topics that cover OOP, architecture, Java/CF hybrid applications, and other "software architecture" topics. All of the tracks include sessions that focus on the integration of two or more Macromedia technologies. You'll find that, in particular, the "design" track focuses often on product integration, and that (obviously) the "Experience Matters" sessions pretty much all go into discussions about multiple products (building rich front ends to robust serverside logic is a fundamental part of RIA, after all).

More and more, I believe we will be seeing cross-product discussion topics on the List and at our conferences. Whether you are a designer or a hardcore server-side developer, these discussions are worth paying attention to. As Macromedia makes Dreamweaver more and more the ideal development environment for CFML, and as rich Internet applications become a more common occurrence on the Web, you'll find that keeping up with the trends makes you that much more marketable and productive a developer.

I strongly encourage those of you at MAX to attend some of the sessions focused on cross-product use, as well as some of the more conceptual CF development sessions. I also encourage you to stop by the SYS-CON Media booth to say "hi" to our CFDJ editor-in-chief, Robert Diamond. Let him know what you think about the magazine, and also, pick up your free copy of the premier issue of MX Developer's Journal!

On a final note - I sincerely hope that you will also track me down before or after one of my sessions, in the vendors' arena, or at one of the social events. These conferences are ultimately all about the community. Every year I look forward to getting to meet CFDJ List members and CFDJ readers, to hear your opinions about the magazine and about this column, as well as for the fun of it!