Macromedia has a bunch of announcements today. Hopefully all the new exciting stuff won't overwhelm people too much.

The press releases (for those of you that are inclined to read those):
Macromedia Unveils New Integrated Product Family
Macromedia Studio MX Delivers Rich Internet Applications
Macromedia - Flash MX : Macromedia Flash Remoting
Macromedia Introduces Dreamweaver MX
Macromedia Introduces Fireworks MX
Macromedia Introduces ColdFusion MX
Macromedia and IBM Bring ColdFusion to WebSphere
Macromedia and Sun Bring ColdFusion to Sun ONE

The gist of the message is: Macromedia is releasing their MX products. For me some of the more exciting news are better glue for all their web products, to do things like connecting to and making available web services, using Flash to connect to web services etc.

For ColdFusion developers, the news of ColdFusion MX being able to run on any major Java Application platform is great news.

ColdFusion has been expanded with the capability of making web services / server services with:
- ColdFusion
- ColdFusion Components
- Server Side ActionScript (!) (Which is, more or less JavaScript).
- Java

The connections between ColdFusion MX and Flash MX or a .NET server, j2ee servers, actually - unless I have missed something here - you can use any web service strapped server to be the gateway for Flash and web services. Mike Chambers provided the following links to the Flashcoders list just some hours ago:

Macromedia Flash Remoting
Getting Started with ColdFusion MX and Flash Remoting
Connecting ColdFusion MX and Macromedia MX

This is plenty neat. Just discovered that there are a number of Macromedia employees with weblogs. The ones I have found so far are:

John Dowdell (support / community guy)
Mike Chambers (Flash/ColdFusion/community/etc)
Vernon Viehe (ColdFusion)
Matt Brown (Dreamweaver/MX)
Bob Tartar (Director)

If you want to get plugged-in to what is going on in Macromedia, keeping an eye on these fellows is probably a good idea..