Adobe had a large booth at JavaOne. They were running multiple presentations of their latest software. Since I’m into Flex now, I knew the latest news in this area, but I did not know all the news.

First, I’ve attended the demo of Adobe Acrobat. As many others, I knew that it’s a great tool for dealing with PDF files. To my surprise, the presenter showed us a quick demo of a PDF file that was getting its data directly from a Web service. Really nice!

When I met with Christophe Coenraetes, Adobe’s senior technical evangelist, he confirmed that this is a step toward the upcoming Adobe universal client. At this point, I’m not exactly sure how this is going to work, but the users will be able to run an independent ( non-browser based) Adobe Acrobat Reader integrated with the Flash player and HTML. This is a part of Adobe Apollo project, which should also include a mobile Flash Lite client.

Then we started talking about Flex 2 and its impact on the world of the rich internet applications. We’ve been writing on the subject before and I do not want to repeat myself, but I like the fact that the users will be able to run their fancy clients in the VM (a.k.a. Flash Player 9) that has a small footprint (under 1MB), easily integrates with Java and is available literally on every platform. Prior to our meeting with Christophe, I’ve been dreaming about free Flex Builder tool and have told him that this would be a really nice way to attract Java developers… Christophe has responded with his famous Mona Lisa smile. OK,OK, at least set the lowest possible price.

Flex 2 will be officially released in a month or so, and I’m looking forward to it. It seems that the marriage of Adobe and Macromedia was made in heaven.