"Macromedia is committed to providing best-of-class technology for building more effective end-user experiences," said Macromedia's general manager David Mendels (pictured), as Macromedia and Mercury Interactive Corporation today here at MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA, announced an agreement to integrate Mercury Quality Center and Mercury Performance Center products with the new Macromedia Flex 2 product line.

"Integrating the Macromedia Flex 2 product line with Mercury Application Delivery offerings will allow Flex development teams to harness the industry's leading quality management automation software products for a more consistent, engaging, and responsive end-user experience.," Mendels continued.

Mercury has licensed Flex technology to help deliver rich data visualization dashboards within future Mercury products. Macromedia has licensed Mercury Quality Center and Mercury Performance Center products for use in the development and deployment of its Flex product line. The integrated Macromedia and Mercury offerings will help joint customers optimize both the quality and performance of rich Internet applications.

"High quality experience applications are critical in delivering the right business outcomes from IT," said Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer, Mercury. "We are excited to work with Macromedia to help our joint customers optimize the quality and performance of their rich Internet applications developed with the Macromedia Flex product line."

For functional testing, Lochhead explained, quality assurance teams will be able to use Mercury QuickTest Professional, part of Mercury Quality Center, to create what he called "effective, object-oriented test scripts and play them back on each build of the application." Full Flex component object recognition and property testing allows these teams to record and play back tests that validate the Flex application is running as expected, he added. 

Integrations with Mercury LoadRunner, part of Mercury Performance Center, will help support performance testing of Flex applications, whether the applications integrate with back-end data using XML, SOAP web services, or the Macromedia AMF binary protocol. Mercury Quality Center allows customers to automate software quality management across a wide range of application environments, provide visibility of quality projects, and align the priorities of quality assurance professionals with the requirements of the business. Mercury Performance Center allows customers to automate application load testing and helps verify that applications will meet business performance requirements.

The Flex 2 product line and Macromedia Flash Player 8.5 are the foundation for building effective rich Internet applications, Mendels noted, "that blend the responsiveness of desktop software, the cross-platform reach of the web, and the breathtaking expressiveness of the Flash Platform."

Flash Player is currently installed on over 600 million desktops and mobile devices globally. Mercury Quality Center integration will be licensed as part of the Flex Enterprise Services 2 product offering. Flex Builder 2, the new Eclipse-based development environment for the Flex Framework, integrates with a wide variety of application life cycle offerings, including Ant, CVS, FlexUnit, and Mercury Quality Center. Flex developers can now implement best development practices in their toolset of choice.

The integration will be delivered with the Flex 2 product line and upcoming versions of Mercury QuickTest Professional and Mercury LoadRunner products. Developers can download public alpha versions of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 on Macromedia Labs at http://www.macromedia.com/go/mmlabs and Mercury QuickTest Professional at http://www.quicktestpro.com.