I am writing this editorial the day after returning from the MAX 2004 Macromedia Conference in New Orleans, LA. As a veteran (or survivor) of many conferences, I can honestly say that this was one of the finest events I have ever attended.

In the October issue of this journal, I put forth the opinion that the future of this business is Flash. This conference more than supported that theory with one slight amendment: Flash inside of mobile technology.

Over the next few months, we will be reporting about the issues and products presented at this year's MAX.

The first day's General Session brought forth many interesting facts. But the big news was that over the next five years, mobile Flash development will be an $80-billion industry. At present, more than 23 million mobile handsets are equipped with the Macromedia Flash Lite player to deliver Web services seamlessly with a rich Internet interface.

Because Macromedia is so committed to this market, a new support program was introduced at MAX called the Mobile Developer Program. It will support mobile developers by offering marketing assistance, information pooling, direct access to a support team, and access to testing servers.

For more information about this exciting program, please visit www.macromedia.com/devnet/devices/dev_program. Over the next year, you will be seeing more articles about this rapidly growing technology.

If the audience was not "wowed" enough with that news, Macromedia introduced Flex 1.5. What I found especially exciting about this was the introduction of Flex Builder. This gives Flex a Dreamweaver-like development interface (and then some). Further, like the other Macromedia server technologies, a free developer's edition is now available for download at www.macromedia.com/software/flex/trial.

The General Session also brought an incredible demonstration - Blackstone, the newest version of ColdFusion. November 2 was the U.S. election day. The audience was asked to deliver a text message, from their cell phones, to a designated address. The text message had to be 1 for John Kerry, 2 for George Bush, or 3 for Ralph Nader. As the audience did this, we saw Blackstone tabulate the results and deliver a moving bar chart. Ben Forta subsequently showed Blackstone's capability to, once again, work with the mobile market.

Of course, the real purpose of the conference was the workshops. While it was physically impossible to attend every event, I would like to mention several that I got to see (and please do not interpret this as my saying that others were not as good).

Ben Forta did a wonderful hands-on ColdFusion workshop. Of course, one can never say anything bad about Ben's talks and workshops.

His workshop focused on the importance of structuring code properly for reusability, efficiency, and maintenance. I sensed many members of the audience walked away with a new understanding of code development.

What I found interesting, however, was his defense of ColdFusion not becoming more object oriented. His feeling is that the purpose of ColdFusion was to combine power with simplicity; and adding OOP capability increases complexity. After seeing the demonstration at the earlier General Session, it was tough to argue the point.

A particular favorite of mine was Angela C. Buraglia's workshop called "Dreamweaver Killer Tips." Angela has always amazed me with her insights and she certainly did not disappoint here. I am an author of a couple of Dreamweaver books and a pretty seasoned user. Yet, even I walked out of her seminar with some new ideas. Happily, Angela has agreed to contribute some articles to this journal in the future.

Our own Art Phillips delivered a wonderful seminar on the very topic he is writing about in these pages: rapid application development in Flash using dynamic data. Art is one of those rare individuals who can take a confusing and complex topic and reduce it to a few simple and understandable steps. Further, he does it without losing the power and possibilities behind the technology. I was quite happy to see the enthusiastic reception he received afterwards.

Here is an interesting statistic: most HTML Web sites, including Amazon.com, have less than 3% of their visitors actually completing a transaction. However, Flash sites could go as high as 8%. This year, we saw a lot of seminars on how to use Flash for online sales. One of the best seminars on this topic, "Single-Screen Checkout: Next Generation Solutions using Flex," was delivered by Praveen Ramanathan.

Praveen is with a company called Molecular, Inc., which has developed several commercially available RIA shopping carts. He gave a very convincing argument, using a couple of case studies, that RIA is the way to go for online commerce. By having all the information in one place, the potential customer does not need to move back and forth between screens.

The exhibitor area showed us a lot of new and exciting products. Over the next few months, we will be reviewing many of them on these pages. A very special thank you needs to be mentioned here.

If you are a regular visitor to our Web site, www.sys-con.com/mxdj, you may have noticed that we have SYS-CON Radio. This service provides interviews with various industry professionals. I was about to record some interviews right from the exhibitor's floor when our recording equipment stopped functioning properly. Our good friends from InterAKT Online jumped to the rescue and saved the day with a portable MP3 recorder.

You will see their ads in this journal. I am a huge fan of their Dreamweaver expansion products. However, as a thank you from the community who reads this journal, please take a look at their site at www.interaktonline.com. I think you will be very impressed.

Finally, another special thank you to Gail Schultz and Dorothy Gil who worked long hours at the SYS-CON booth signing up new subscribers and answering questions. Thanks to them, there are several hundred new members to our community.

By the time you read this issue, the holidays will be upon us. I want to take this opportunity to wish each of our readers a joyous holiday and a healthy and happy 2005.

Next month, I'll be announcing some exciting changes coming to this journal.