Adobe advancing the vision of tomorrow's developer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/12/adobe_livecycle/
This illustrates the changing role of the developer, for it makes it possible for business managers, particularly if they fall into the `power user’ category, to create and / or adapt workflow practices of their own using the Q-PACs. The upside of this is that it can create a business capable of reacting more quickly to change. It also means that the role of the developer is taking one more step along the road from code-cutting `applications development’ to business process development.
Fry was at pains to point out that LiveCycle is not aimed at cutting developers out of creating workflow processes, but more towards up-skilling them. “We have a Professional Services organisation that is specifically aimed at pushing up the skills of our customers,” he said.
A while ago I met with Adobe to learn about 'Adam & Eve' and other interesting work they're doing that related to work a startup called Orangery was offering with mobile interface generation loosely coupled with BPEL spun from their custom IDE (coincidentally known as Eden) - our interest (SalePlane) was embedding the logic and ease of Decisionality into this mix.
Where Decisionality has differed over Adobe and others is that it has leap-frogged certain areas traditionally dependent on developers and empowers the business user who we prefer to call the subject matter expert (SME) to be in control of authoring and knowledge management. Now it looks like Adobe has finally joined the party!
I recently commented at Patrick Kerpan's blog on whether Borland would evolve to develop tools for the business user as part of the rejuvenation of the software house's go-to-market strategy, not surprisingly it was perhaps an ambitious question :-)
So, fellow coders & developers - the future be in the middleware me thinks ;-)