Seybold: GoLive, GoLive, GoLive…

CreativePro Staff

Not only does Adobe have the most booth space at Seybold San Francisco (barring perhaps Apple Computer which, after all, has to prove that it’s back), but Adobe has made the most product announcements — fifteen in all. So as to make them more manageable for my reading public, I’ll focus on the Web-related announcements (and no, I don’t consider Photoshop a Web-authoring product, as Adobe now seems to). Luckily for all of you, this leaves plenty to talk about.

Since Adobe released GoLive 5.0, an update to the professional Web authoring package it acquired a couple years back from the German company of the same name, it has been hard at work developing partnerships with various other Web-products vendors, with the apparent aim of making GoLive the default visual Web authoring package. One of the most-touted new features in GoLive 5.0 is something called 360Code, which ensures that the software will not alter any code created by other coding languages, such as XHTML or ASP (Adobe appears to be addressing the often divergent goals of the Web designer and Web programmer in many of today’s Web development offices), and with this new feature, GoLive seems to lend itself to integration with other authoring and programming environments.

For starters, Adobe has allied with Allaire Corporation, the maker of the ColdFusion authoring and scripting package (it has it’s own markup language, dubbed CFML), to create a ColdFusion extension for GoLive 5.0. The addition will let Web developers create CFML code within GoLive’s authoring environment. The companies have also agreed to work to integrate GoLive and other Adobe products, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat, with other Allaire tools, such as HomeSite (an HTML compiler).

Adobe has also announced a partnership with Blue World Communications, maker of the Lasso Studio and Lasso Web Data Engine products for creating database-driven Web sites. Under the agreement, Blue World will release a version of Lasso Studio optimized for GoLive 5.0. The new version of Blue World’s product will let Web developers publish information from any ODBC-compliant or OLE DB database on the Web from within GoLive’s interface, and will be available this Fall.

Not to be outdone on the rich-media front, Adobe also announced an investment in Metastream, a subsidiary of MetaCreations, that will net the company Metastream technologies for publishing interactive 3-D content on the Web. Adobe also bought MetaCreation’s Canoma software for creating 3-D images from Photoshop files. In addition, Metastream will integrate SVG (scalable vector graphics, an Adobe-backed image technology from the World Wide Web Consortium) with its own 3-D file format, MTS3. The format, which works over narrowband Internet connections, allows Web developers to create high-resolution interactive 3-D images for applications such as the ever-popular e-commerce site. Adobe president Bruce Chizen will sit on Metastream’s and MetaCreation’s board of directors.

Throwing its support behind the burgeoning wireless device market (PDA’s, cell phones, digital organizers, even pagers), Adobe also made a number of announcements aimed at bringing GoLive-developed content to those devices. An extension to GoLive 5.0 will allow Web developers to create content using Wireless Markup Language (WML), a technology for delivering pared-down Web content to devices with teeny screens. Adobe is also joining the WAP (wireless application protocol) Forum, the group steering much of the technology surrounding wireless devices. In addition, AvantGo, a company that delivers Web content to wireless devices in a palatable format, is working on creating a GoLive 5.0 extension via Adobe’s GoLive SDK.

Not willing to be left behind the e-commerce bandwagon, Adobe has been busy forging alliances in this arena as well. To this end, the company will be integrating Manna’s FrontMind e-commerce personalization package with GoLive, and will make it easier for GoLive developers to use WebTrends’ visitor analysis tools with Adobe’s software.

Lest you think Adobe was the only Web-products vendor at the show, rest assured, there were a spate of Web-content-management tool vendors there as well. The two strongest trends in content-management packages seem to be support for XML (which certainly furthers the write-once-publish-anywhere dream) and support for WML. (Let’s face it: There aren’t many folks out there without Internet-enabled cell phones these days…Or is that just in San Francisco?).

Running Start showcased its forthcoming ArticleBASE 3.0 (due this fall), which is boasting support for XML, WAP, and Java. The company says the new version will make it easier to create dynamic data especially for wireless devices.

VERSIFI trundled out an update to its VERSIFI software. Version 2.9 of the Web content management package will integrate with IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Suite and will have better security and site search capabilities in addition to support for Java and XML.

Openpages‘ ContentWare 2.5, which was actually released in June (in the interest of fair reporting), will beef up its Java and XML support, and will let users generate Web pages (even in XML) directly from Microsoft Word documents. The package, which boasts Knight-Ridder and RealCities.com as customers, can also integrate with Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, Macromedia Dreamweaver, SoftQuad’s XmetaL, and QuarkXPress. Other new features include support for Java Server Pages and XSL (extensible style language) templates.

Finally, Worldweb.net showcased its Expressroom I/O content management package, available since May. The package now has an XT Connector for importing material from QuarkXPress into XML documents. Also new is — you guessed it — support for WML. It’s apparently time for me to get myself a cell phone.

Read more by Andrea Dudrow.