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The Drumbeat 2000 & Macromedia Saga |
| Subject: Open Letter from Macromedia Part I Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 17:51:17 -0700 From: Beth Davis <bdavis@macromedia.com> Organization: Macromedia Newsgroups: macromedia.ultradev In response to the letter from Rick Curtis, Thank you for taking the time to write to us on your concerns as a Drumbeat customer about UltraDev. I, along with many of us at Macromedia, have been personally reading the newsgroups and we are taking the concerns presented by you and the other Drumbeat customers very seriously. For the past several months, many teams at Macromedia have been working with Drumbeat customers and with third parties to develop documentation, training materials, extensions and functionality for UltraDev to ensure an easy and successful transition from Drumbeat to UltraDev. From the very beginning, UltraDev was conceived with the Drumbeat developer in mind. Specifically, we are working to: * Combine the best of the visual design environment and Roundtrip HTML in Dreamweaver and the server-scripting environment of Drumbeat to give you a powerful, robust product that will help you quickly build Web sites that connect to databases. * Help developers make the transition to a new environment by offering specific documentation to help Drumbeat users convert sites and working habits to the new product including a special section of the UltraDev Users Guide dedicated to applying your Drumbeat experience to the new design environment. * Provide a free 3-hour online training workshop to help you get up to speed quickly and at your convenience. * Develop a Macromedia authorized training program for even more in-depth training. * Provide a Dreamweaver UltraDev training video. * Offer a discounted upgrade price of only $99 for all Drumbeat customers and a free upgrade to UltraDev for Drumbeat customers who purchased after April 3, 2000. * Address the concerns presented by Drumbeat 2000 ecommerce customers by announcing our plans to provide important ecommerce extensions to UltraDev as free downloads that will be available immediately after Drumbeat is released. The first of these is a shopping cart extension described below. * Work directly with partners in the various areas of ecommerce to develop a wide range of e-commerce options that can be downloaded from the Macromedia Exchange. * Offer integration with products like Macromedia Fireworks, Flash and Director. * Deliver on the commitment to support additional application servers and databases beyond the ASP, and JSP for IBM WebSphere that Drumbeat supported. * * The product development evolution One of the biggest questions on the minds of the Drumbeat community is why Macromedia decided to develop UltraDev on top of Dreamweaver rather than continue to develop Drumbeat. During the talks before Macromedia and Elemental agreed to the acquisition, we found that the both companies shared a common goal of enabling developers to quickly build web sites that connect to databases. The development team at Elemental had already identified customer requirements to deliver a product with great table editing, an open architecture with which it was easy to integrate, and offered developers access to the code, known as Roundtrip HTML(tm). The Drumbeat architecture, based on a proprietary file format, could not support access to the code, easy extensibility and preserve the underlying HTML in a visual design environment. In order to successfully compete in the future, Elemental determined they would have to completely re-write the Drumbeat engine, a project that alone would take several man-years of engineering. After Elemental and Macromedia joined, the Drumbeat product team started defining the product that would be the next generation of Drumbeat. We met with Drumbeat customers, Dreamweaver customers, and other web application developers who were either hand-coding their applications or using a proprietary tool from Microsoft of Allaire. Those developers all had the same requirements: * Complete access to the source code and the ability for developers to add hand-coded scripts. For many customers, a product that didn't offer access to and preservation of the code would not be acceptable. * An easily extensible architecture that can be customized from one customer project to the next, and * An architecture that could be easily extended to support different application servers. In order for a web application development solution to succeed, it must be possible for customers and partners to add server models. Drumbeat provided great support for ASP, but other application servers were growing in popularity. At that point, realizing that the Drumbeat architecture could not support the basic customer needs, the Drumbeat team made a decision to extend the Dreamweaver platform with the application server functionality found in Drumbeat versus continuing to develop on the Drumbeat code base. In the words of Julie Thompson who has been with Drumbeat since the first version of the product, " All of us from Elemental have always wanted to make Drumbeat a more flexible design environment like Dreamweaver and once we joined Macromedia we finally had that chance." The new product does not attempt to create a feature for feature match of Drumbeat. Rather we have picked the strengths of both Dreamweaver and Drumbeat to create a product that best meets the needs of professional developers. In particular, UltraDev will offer things Drumbeat developers can uniquely appreciate: * Support for ASP, vendor-neutral JSP and ColdFusion in one single product (no need to buy separate versions) * A Mac OS version * The ability to easily add server scripts and server-side behaviors to a web site * A visual design environment to create pages that display, navigate and update database data * Easy connection to any ODBC, JDBC or ADO relational database * Support for flow based HTML * Textbook server scripts. No more include files to uploaded to the server * Roundtrip HTML(tm), and a full copy of HomeSite (Windows) or integrated BBEdit Eval (Mac) * A fully-documented, easy to use JavaScript API for extending the product * An extensions exchange, where customers can easily download and share extensions to the product * A menu system that can be completely customized using XML Ongoing product support for Drumbeat 2000 |