BANGALORE, INDIA: Having gained acclaim as one of the front-running options for design-centric application creation on the Internet, Adobe, at the Bangalore leg of its DevSummit for 2009 introduced to designers and developers, the Flash Catalyst, which is aimed at helping the fraternity to harmoniously create and deploy Rich Internet Applications faster, more efficiently, with fewer bugs and auto-generation of code to assist designers.

In an exclusive demo by Serge Jespers, platform evangelist, Adobe Systems, a Rich Internet Application that allowed a user to search the employee details of a company, complete with visualization options, drop up/down menus, synching up with independently created database, was created in under 15 minutes using the Catalyst tool.

Ben Forta, director of Platform Evangelism, Adobe said, “The idea of the tool stems out from the fact that designers have their own set of tools that cater to them, while developers have their favourite programming languages. Traditionally, they wouldn’t talk to each other and designers would invariable face the tough challenge of having to incorporate design challenges as and when the development demands changes and vice versa."

He added, "With the Catalyst, code is auto-generated at the basic design stage, by importing the design from Illustrator, Photoshop or other tools. More importantly, Catalyst allows real-time changes in code, if need be, to affect the performance of the application or the design.”

By synching up the catalyst to Adobe’s Flash builder, Adobe hopes to lure enterprise-level Flash development and make Adobe graduate from the reputation of being a gimmicky entertainment-centric application creation tool. The synching up will ensure that code can be written independently at any stage and the corresponding design changes will be ‘understood’ efficiently by the Catalyst.