I feel happy and sad in the same time. I put the bases of InterAKT in 2000, and it was a hell of a ride. Let's start with the beginning.

I'm a kid - 13 years old or so. In the communist Romania, computers were scarce. So I stood in front of the computers club, sneak-peeking through the keyhole at - "Casa pionierilor" (Kid's house, yes, that's a long story - click here to jump to the InterAKT era, and here to jump to the conclusions :). I see orange on a TV screen. And some movement. Orange is a nice color (and color TV's are rare in the communist Romania) so I continue peeking until the door opens and the teacher invites me in. Someone was playing a computer game - "Gunfright". I was very shy as a kid, so I stayed only because of the orange on the screen and that's how my life was change by a color. (the screenshots that I found don't actually show orange, but that's what I recall :) 

I've started to love computers and quickly become addicted to them. I was waking up at 5 am to stay in line and get the best computer (HC-85. Sinclair Spectrum compatibles). Then, my mom bought me a Russian equivalent of a Sinclair - Byte. We bought it from the market, directly from the Russians, and we haven't checked it. When we got home, it was broken. I cried for 2 days J. Then mom managed to have it repaired and I was the happiest block in the world.

Then I've met Bogdan, our parents knew each others and he had his own Sinclair spectrum compatible. We've started learning computer science together. Algorithms, contents, competition and a lot of fun. I remember one week we went to his country house and we've build a Windowing system in assembly code for Z80. Pretty cool, using a simple joystick instead of the mouse. If you're bored, click here to jump to the university.

As I was in love with computers, I choose a computer science high-school (communism was over when I've entered the high school so things began to modernize). Soon I found my first computer, a 386 DX. That was cool, it had everything but a co-processor.

Highschool was fun, I was always the second to first computer science guy in my region, so I never got to the national contests. However, some of my advice benefited Bogdan and he actually won the nationals, so I felt very happy. I had Mr. Bazon as my teacher, he was really into assembly code so we were doing a lot of assembly stuff. He was a good teacher, however he never liked me for some reason) (Hi Mr. Bazon J

We've also managed to write a vocal recognition system. It was quite fun - as we didn't have a sound card so we were forced to read the sound in binary form through the bi-directional printer port. And then re-program the 16385 URT timer (or something) to get the right sampling. And then implementing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) without a co-processor, in assembly code. I did the engine, Bogdan did the 3d isometric representation of the frequencies (similar to what you get by default in winamp right now). We were close to recognize actual words through pattern recognition but we had other stuff to do.

Highschool was quickly over and then I moved to Bucharest. By a chance, I was admitted to the French and English streams, and I chose the French stream. They told us you have bigger chances to go out of the country if you were at the French stream.

Fortunately, we had a great dean, Mr. Fluerasu, and a very good teacher, Mrs. Sabac, who taught me a lot of stuff about life and who believed in me. They've sent me out in my first internship in Toulouse. Java 1.0 programming back in 96, that was cool.

In the meanwhile, I've joined my first startup as a CEO: Contextus. You've probably haven't heard of it because it died pretty soon. We were very, very young, and selling websites to Romanians, in 1996, wasn't such a great business. By December 97, I left with a sore taste in my mouth.

I got Bogdan in the French stream (his French skills were inexistent, but he was a brilliant computer scientist and Mr. Fluerasu always liked folks like us) and we've joined our second startup: Tradenet. It was supposed to be a Romanian e-Trade, but it failed to succeed because many reasons.

Bogdan got his internships in France. I got hired at Starom, a division of Romanian Data Soft. I was doing Java programming and other stuff, working on a VMWare clone. I wasn't very successful there, but I've learnt a lot about programming. Still, I was maturing and I've used a lot of the experience gathered here in the InterAKT era.

Which reminds me. Bogdan was doing overtime in France, and he managed to save 2000 EUR. He returned to Romania and was wondering whether to buy a car or to start a company with me. He made the right decision and borrowed me 1,000 EUR, and then we've started InterAKT. (I paid him back 5 years later J)

Our initial plan was to do some outsourcing for Bogdan's French friends. And we've started in the Politehnica university dorms. Unfortunately, we've stated InterAKT inside the dot com crash. So the contracts fade away quickly and we were left in the sun, with some ideas and no actual contract or commercial experience.

We've also sold few shares to Mihai Pricope and Cristian Marin - for several hundreds bucks the percent. They made a significant ROI now :)

After the dorms, we've been working for a French company that offered us free office space, and then when it went bankrupt we've moved to a rented apartment (the Romanian equivalent of a garage). It had 400 square feet, and there were 6 of us working there.

We loved PHP, and we didn't have a good editor to work with. Based on the recommendation of a friend (thank you Ovidiu!), we took a look at Ultradev, an IDE that didn't support PHP but supported everything else. So we've started to work on the PHP support in Ultradev. Later, we found out that a guy from Macromedia was working on something similar, but was less powerful than ours (Dan Radigan, he's no longer with Adobe). He gave us some good advice and that's how PHAkt - our PHP server model for Ultradev, was born. It was an instant hit, and I think that it was downloaded a million times from our website since.

On a side track, Mr. Fluerasu introduced us to Swiro, a Swiss-Romanian company that was developing an ERP for the textile industry. We've worked through the first year really hard trying to implement a fully fledged ERP - and that's still working despite the lack of actual maintenance.

Fortunately, in a strike of genius, we understood that the Dreamweaver extensions are actually a much better market than doing outsourcing - because they are a business that has a weak relationship with the size of the team, as compared to outsourcing, that required a large team in order to have significant revenues. So we've split the company in two with Bogdan, he was doing outsourcing to fund the R&D expenses and I've started the products division. We've released ImpAKT and NeXTensio and start selling products over the Internet. I think we've sold 200 licenses in the first year

Then we've decided to move to a bigger apartment, and we took one that was almost double. We've started to organize our sales, both for outsourcing and the InterAKT website was growing slowly.

In terms of relationship with Macromedia, we were making ourselves known at a steady pace, but it was a hard process. When you're a completely unknown company from Romania, it's hard to get anyone listen to you. However, we've started building the dream that will be bought by Macromedia some day. It helped me a lot during recruiting and motivational times J.

The company development continued in the following years with Krysalis - a platform for content publishing over the Internet using XML and XSL. Krysalis was the foundation for Komplete, our Content Management System, and we had several successful implementations of this, the most important one being www.mcti.ro (the Romanian ministry of IT&C). The technology was great, but it was too complicated for people to really grasp the concepts, so it died in about 2 years.

As the current apartment was small, we've decided to move to some new offices. By chance, we found this office building that was quite inexpensive - Ayash Center - so we've moved in and that's where we're still staying now. We initially got 1500 square feet for roughly 20 people. Now we have 4500 square feet and everything is much nicer.

Business was great, we were tripling or doubling each year. However, we've realized that the Komplete consulting business wasn't the best thing to do. So we've decided to focus on Dreamweaver instead of doing consulting work.

In the same time, we had some infusion of talent in the company. Sebastian, a San Diego law/CS graduate, came in and started to tech us everything about people skills and empathy. We realized that, even if we were very good programmers, and successful businessmen, we weren't great people managers. With Sebastian's help, we've started to change and I think that his contribution was great and shaped our future. Another significant help came from Cristi Cheran - a very direct and rough guy that was in love with interaction design (IxD) and website usability. His books and reviews of our products helped us improve MX Kollection to a level that wasn't achievable before. Both left the company for various reasons, but we owe them a big Thank You!

Then the MX Kollection era came up. MX Kollection was a product built for the customers, by skilled sales, product managers, programmers, testers and doc writers. It wasn't a code feast, but it was really designed for usability.

The rest is modern history so I won't get into details (yes, even I got bored of this :)

The most interesting stuff that happened in the last year was the acquisition. It all started with an e-mail asking us if we can talk, roughly one year ago. Then all the normal steps in an M&A process followed, and we've managed to convince Adobe that we're the right company to acquire in the region.

And today is day 1. We've signed the papers yesterday, transforming from entrepreneurs to employees. But that's a different league, and I hope that it will be a very fertile ground for me.

That's my story. I had several mild failures at the beginning, mostly caused by my naiveté. However, I never went back and always took new challenges - and that's my advice to you. If you're smart and want to succeed, you will, if you invest enough time and energy.

However, it's weird how emptiness replaces enthusiasm when your dreams come true. I have to find a new dream soon :)

Alexandru - InterAKT founder

They paid us a decent amount of money, and most of the team remained inside Adobe: me as a Site Director, Bogdan as a Director of Engineering.

We're also very excited of the things to come. With this acquisition, Adobe is taking some of our technology and integrates it inside their products, so we'll continue to create software. But our desire to help web developers do things better is here to stay - and we hope that, inside Adobe, we'll find a very fertile ground for innovation.

They bought us for a multitude of reasons. InterAKT was a great team, with lots of web technologies and desire to simplify web development, and we were very well connected in the Adobe ecosystem (by working for Adobe, by writing articles for them, by being a very popular presence at conferences, by crating a strong community around our products, etc). So the acquisition is somehow common sense - in the last years, we've received a lot of questions from customers wondering why Adobe isn't buying us (and it was hard to tell them that they are ~, but you don't want to mess with the Adobe NDAs or with their lawyers :)).

In terms of our current products - Adobe will do some changes. The most popular ones will stay, and will be united in a new bundle called "Kollection" (including MX Kollection Pro, KTML, CSS Menus and XML Import Export). Others will be reviewed and their technology will be integrated in various Adobe products. Kollection is available for purchase for $399 and specific upgrade prices are available for existing customers

We're continuing to focus our attention on Dreamweaver, but we'll also start doing some serious Flex work. And our Ajax skills are something Adobe is interested in, so you should expect some sweet Ajax stuff coming from the Romanian labs soon.

We'll also take good care of the existing InterAKT customers - so we'll provide full support for all the InterAKT products at least for the next 6 months. All purchased products will be available for download for some time - but I would download and save them if I were you.

You will find more information about this in the official F.A.Q.

Now for some InterAKT in numbers:

• Almost 6 years of existence
• 60 web development products
• 500+ versions and releases
• 50+ people were InterAKT employees
• 33 still are employees
• 100% revenues growth year on year in the last 5 years
• 10,000+ commercial clients (if we consider promotional offers)
• 1,000,000+ downloads for our free products
• 200+ custom built websites
• 6 GB of personal mail
• 3,700,000 visits on our site (from 1/1/2003)
• 35,000,000 page views
• 7 Google Page Rank (we had 8 before the Florida update)
• 150,000 registered customers
• 20 sponsored web conferences
• 10+ wild InterAKT parties
• An unnumbered amount of late hours, beers, pizza, jokes, bad jokes, and more

I've also written a very long tale on my and InterAKT's history, if you have some spare time, don't hesitate to read it (I figured out that that's the only time people will actually want to read something on me, so that's my ego's only chance to get some attention).

Alexandru

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,110120-page,1/article.html

"We're working with the Department of Transportation to figure out how you'll be allowed to bring them on a plane. People still carry Bic lighters onto planes, which are far more flammable than [fuel cells]," says Bill Acker, president and CEO of MTI Micro, which hopes to market fuel cell technology to notebook and gadget manufacturers.

I suspect MTI Micro is not enjoying this terror in the air situation at all.

Alexandru

Some might find it too revolutionary, but you won't be able to tell it solves a problem that doesn't exist - information overload is here, helping us spend most of our lives digesting information.

We hope that myFeedz will change the way you keep updated with the blogosphere. Join the beta and find out if you like it or not!

http://myfeedz.com/

Alexandru

Pasting from the myFeedz blog:

myFeedz public beta is here and we are ready to accept more registrations. So, if you have been happily using myFeedz for the duration of the private beta, send your friends over to the myfeedz homepage and we'll hook them up with an account.

Over the last couple of months we have been improving our secret sauce and we also added a ton of features like:

• complex tag queries
• feeds for everything that looks like a list
• a homepage that actually gives out useful articles
• usability and layout
  

.....

Alexandru

I found a possible bug in MX Robert: 

When I am trying to input MX Milk into db_stomach, I am getting redirected to pampers.php but the output looks quite different than expected and I get an error message as follows: 

---------------------------

Microsoft Diaper Explorer

---------------------------

To replace this placeholder, please upload the original image (%s) on server and insert it in the document.

---------------------------

OK  

---------------------------

Is this a bug or a feature?

Congratulations to you and your wife and whole "new" family from Munich. Enjoy as much as you can.  ...they grow so fast...

Alexandru: Hehehe. Robert is doing fine, just started to gain weight, but compared to his daddy, he's 225 pounds short :).

Alexandru

We expect some major changes in our life, and we hope that we'll face this challenge with a smile on our face. I know the InterAKT team is happy that Robert will drain my powers and I will cease to be drastic at work:). Now it's time to celebrate...

The hostpital is decent (for Romania) and we have received a good care from our doctor - Alexandru Badiu.

Things that happened today:

• dollar/euro ratio is 1.28
• a liter of petrol is 40000
• I'll fill more stuff after seeing the news later
  

Alexandru, proud (and not fully understanding all the implications :) dad

Google checkout was released yesterday, but it seems that it's US only for now. The concept is simple, I wasn't able to login nor to create my GCheckout account as I'm not American :), but from the Flash tour I've seen it seems that the service will make AdWords clients' life easier by allowing faster purchasing.

It's clearly competing against PayPal, at least from my non-US perspective (PayPal refused to create an account for us, too :). The fees are 2%+30c, a very good price compared to the 5.5%+45c that we pay now to 2Checkout.

Alexandru

He's the new ColdFusion Sr Marketing Manager. I hope we'll be able to meet again, I'm a speaker at MAX and we won't miss MAX this time.

Alexandru

We feel that this marks an important milestone in our development. We're also wiser this time, not claiming that we're the leaders of the Dreamweaver extensions market :), as this is not important to you. What's important is our desire to continue to create good web development products - and I guarantee that we're dedicating all our energy to this.

Thanks to all of you that are using our products to improve their work. It's very good to know that we've been able to help you.

To celebrate this achievement, we're giving away free products. All the people that are registered to receive news on our site will have the chance today to give away one of our commercial extensions to three of their friends - also getting a free product in return. We hope that you'll join us in spreading the word on InterAKT, letting your friends know about our products.

Looking forward to double again our customer base.

Alexandru

One more evening compiling the Adobe conference call. It's already customary and I hope that JD will appreciate. At least until the breeze is released (last time I've seen only a couple of days delay).

I'm interested to listen to what they're gonna say, especially with all the Microsoft/PDF issues.

Old phone conference technology, telephone based. Everything will be available as Breeze.

Welcome

• Mike Savage: meet the team
• We'll discuss the Q2 finacial results
  

Bruce

• challenging quarter, below our target
• we achieved 31 cents per share
• we're doing progress in Macromedia acquisition. Integration of our sales organizations to maximize the enterprise sales
  
• Steven Elop will leave Adobe to pursue other interests. Alex: That's sad, I've seen Steven at some conferences and he was really charismatic ... A big loss for Adobe.
  

Murray

• the results will not be compared with the Macromedia+Adobe previous year results
• we'll compare Q2 to our Q1 and with Q2_2005 (Adobe only)
• only $639M this quarter compared to $655M last quarter. Other financial stuff continues, read more details here :)
• More employees - especially in R&D. Alex: I've missed the number, but the rough increase is 200 people.
• Creative Suite products went down $20M. Creative Suite premium was lower.
• Most of the business areas went down - usually $1-5M. Only the Other  business area increased with $13M
• US and Europe went down because of the Spring Break.

Shantanu

• Highlight major business
• Creative solutions. Declined demand as we've entered the new cycle.
• Demand for upgrades for Suite and Studio are falling off sooner than anticipated
• Several large publishing companies uses Creative Suite and InDesign. Also some book publishers.
  
• Regarding the digital video stuff, the products launched in Q1 were selling very good. Increase use of video on the web because of Flash.
• Numerous awards at the NAB conference for content creation for Production Studio.
• Our Flash tech is going well with various companies. Flash encoded video with Flash Streaming. Flash based ads. MySpace, Google, YouTube use Flash video to enhance their brands.
• Photoshop remained steady, one year after release.
• We're on track to deliver the next version of Creative Suite in Q2 next year.
• Acrobat is ok
  
• Breeze is an exciting oportunity for Adobe, even it's a small part of our business.
• LifeCycle continues to do well in the government agency that is responsible with making the government digital. LiveCycle is being used in governments around the world - with great success. Banks use Flex for greater performance, better communications and better user experience.
  
• Our server products sales over $50K was 97.
• Regarding PDF forms and LiveCycle, we've made some alliances with large companies doing digital workflows (Rico, Accord).
• For mobile and device - Verizon wireless alliance for Flash content. $2M subscribers in Japan for the FlashCast emitted content.
• Other - platform business unit, print and publishing business unit. Distribution of the Yahoo Toolbar with the Adobe reader, Flash and Shockwave players. Alex: Now I understand:)
  

Randy Furr

• I'll present the Q3 strategy, and I'm glad to have joined the Adobe team. Murray - thanks for helping me with the transition.
• Q3 - $580-$630M. Q3 GAP operating margin 16-19%. 606-608M shares. 25-27 cents per share forcast.
  
• $2.4-2.6B - nongap E/S range of ~$1.3
  
• We expert normal Q3 seasonal weaknees in Europe and Japan. Tipycal Q3 seasonal strenght of educational in America.
  

Bruce

• Issue regarding the split between Adobe and Microsoft. It's normal for Adobe to clarify negotiations with partners.
• We've been in discussion for what we believe it's an abuse in using PDF in office/vista
• We think Microsoft could use its position to undermine our technology.
• We haven't decided if we'll sue.
• We're confident in our ability to succeed with Microsoft in the long term.
• Final words on our outlook - market oportunities for us are greater, with the need to access rich content increasing. With key strategic partnership and talented employees, we believe that we'll be able to have a bright future

Mike

• "Breeze will be available later today". Alex: My quest in writing down these conferences is over :)
  

Questions:

• Are you assuming any help from Acrobat/LiveCycle in Q3? Bruce: the creative was slowing down. there are issues because of MacTel. We're expecting seasonality in Q3, business will be down from Q2, and will get back in Q4. Acrobat is coming in Q4, and Q4 should be a very good quarter for Acrobat.
• Historically, you've been more exposed to the economical cycle, because of the graphic artists that sell to the print and advertising segments. Do you expect seasonality in your customers orders? Bruce: customers are moving to Apple's new platform, and our products don't work on mactel. We think (reader/player distribution) that we have a good balance, with Acrobat in Q4, that we have enough. Japan was very strong in Q2. Seasonality is not an economic issue, but people are holding for an upgrade.
  
• CS3 question - still planeed for spring release. Answer: Yes.
• Anything that you could tell us about the CS3 upgrade? Shentanu: we're listning to the customers, and in this cycle it's important for our customers to see better integration. Our focus is to deliver great products that integrate both companies offerings. Supporting MacTel and Vista is the next major stuff. Bruce: Acrobat, Video business, Platform and redistributing other people's products - I feel good about growing our business until CS3. Shantanu: marketing, we'll continue to work and convince people that CS2 is good.
  
• Where do you stand with the buyback? Answer: $813M are already bought
• we're mentioning that you're following the seasonal patterns. If you look at these patterns, how has this product cycle changed from other cycles in the past. Why there are surprises with these Spring breaks? Shantanu: CS2 is perceived very well by products. In middle of April, we were running ahead of the estimations. But MacTel, along with anticipation of the integration, made people accelerate the seasonality.
• In the past, Q were linear. Has that changed? Murray: in Q2, April weakness affected us. As we become more focused on enterprise solutions. However, we're still a linear company. July is very, very slow. We use a big uptake in the end of August as people get back to work and students return to school. Somehow linear, but never that linear
• I was curious how your sales forces organize. Tell us more about Steven. Will you re-allocate the sales force organization? Bruce: We've decided that through the transition we will move the force under Shantanu. Synergies between business people and sales is important. Sales  force is important for the enterprise products. You'll see the biggest impact of our revenue there.
• Is your intention as a company to identify a new leader. How it's going to be run? Bruce: we're searching a new head of sales at 2pm today :) Steve is still on our side.
  
• Clarification - seems like you're not going to operate MacTel until Q2 2007. Any advice on emulator or stuff for performance in the next year? Shantanu: Our products work well on an number of Mac. CS do not run well on NoteBook products. CS3 will be compatible with MacTel. Bruce: Mac is 20% of the overall business. Our products work for now, not fast, but we prefer to save force for CS3.
• Regarding some new bundles. Acrobat 3D. Shantanu: Web/Design/Video bundles. Video did very well. In addition to that, the web bundle (very expensive) performs well. Bruce: It's exciting that we've begun to integrate the MM products with the Adobe products.
• Microsoft issue - will the PDF format be included in Office? Bruce: I can't speculate what Microsoft is doing. Our issue is not about PDF, is about Microsoft taking advantage of their monopoly, reducing innovation and eliminate choice. The reality is (if we look at the PDF creating), Acrobat owns it. Microsoft concerns us for the future.
  
• CS3 and Acrobat 8 release? Shantanu: talking about the schedule, Acrobat will be released in Q4, and CS3 in Q2. Can't share other information
• Share repurchase - are you still active in the market? Bruce: it's out of our control, third parties are doing it.
• Other revenues - increse, yahoo. Was this a one time event? Shantanu: With respect with the other segments, we've been investing in the platform business - the engagement platform will be able to monetize it. We would expect that sequentially this will continue to be in the Q2 range.
• A decent proportion of the Macromedia products contributed to the decline? Do you think that you've had more costs post-merger? Shantanu: Primary revenue shortfall in Q2 was associated with Premiere Suite and Studio Products. We've focused on areas of investment, and we don't believe that we have to make any changes in the product structure.
• Regarding the bundles - CS3 is the largest product out there. How will you update old bundles to new bundles? Shantanu: We're doing a fair amount of research, and people is doing design mainly - but other are doing mobile, web. We're still looking at the best way to package them correctly for customers in these core areas.
  
• How do you explain performance difference between Japan and Europe/USA? Bruce: They are experiencing a stronger economy, healthy business, brand presence is strong, end of the year for some of their companies and great execution from our side. We're still delivering 38% operating margin. Nothing has changed in our business in terms of long term oportunities. Everything we've talked about is still true - explosion of information and people need it - and we have unique solutions to fulfill that need.
• We're getting closer to CS3 - we need some upgrade plans. Some typical guidance for Q1 2007. We need an idea of the core products slow down to forecast Q1 2007. Shantanu: Historically, compared with CS1, CS2 is still doing very strong. With respect with what we're doing right now, we have a consistent policy in plan, and we have no plans to change the strategy that we've employed in the past. Bruce: there are customers in the future that require features of existing products.
  
• Personal changes in the channel organization? Bruce: the organization is stable, efficient. We're focusing on the enterprise side of it
• What you're expcting with the margin? Bruce: We haven't talked for guidance for FY 2007. For Q3 we've gived guidance. Q4 we've given some EPS targets.
• How long prior to release will you announce shipping date? Shantanu: we don't :). We are transparent with Wall Street - but we're not disclosing dates.
• Revenue from August to November - steep increase. How will you do the growth? Shantanu: Q4 is pick-up in Europe. Retail holiday in US. Acrobat in Q4. These factors are our guidance.
• Regarding mobile - something coming from there? Shantanu: what we did is put Flash in the handset. Now we're working with content providers - FlashCast. If the ecosystem carry flash, this allow us to monetize in novel ways.
  
• Have you changed the mobile monetization approach Macromedia had? Shantanu: Three directions from mobile: royalty from handset manufacturers with Flash lite. Mobile manufacturers that require a customized user experience. Third approach - FlashCast - subscriber based. Bruce: we are still receiving royalties for handsets.
• Dual processors support? Shantanu: we're taking advantage of all advancements - 3D, CPU power, etc.
  

That's all, folks :)

Alexandru

Our Ajax-related history goes way back in 2002, when we've first released an Ajax application - MX Query Builder. Designed to help developers create SQL queries visually, it used the XMLHttpRequest and a lot of DHTML for an Access-like experience, over the web.

Then we've continued to create Ajax-libraries for our visual HTML editor, KTML. In version 3, we have started to build a utility library for most of the complex stuff that we needed, cross-browser and stuff.

In 2005, our Ajax work continued with the release of MX Kollection 3 and KTML 4. Two products that heavily rely on Ajax libraries to increase the user experience - MX Widgets with desktop-like form controls, usable form validation and Word-like content editing experience. We've used a clearly separated namespace for supplemental attributes in Widgets, like Dojo and Backbase.

Now we're working on the next generation of our products. MX Ajax Toolbox and MX Kollection 4 are two of our products that heavily rely on Ajax, and we need to find a library, or extend one, to match our needs.

Initially we've started to work with our in-house libraries. But we've realized that it would be better for us to join the efforts of a public library, one that was designed for public use and that is embraced by lots of developers. Something like joining a standard.

So we've researched the world out there. And initially we've chosen Prototype and Scriptaculous. Based on these, we've ported our in-house libraries to them, and then started to work on the Ajax Toolbox. But we've met problems. Documentation was missing completely, and some of the stuff we were building in-house is already present in other libraries like Dojo or Yahoo UI Library.

After several months of work, we've decided to go out again and check if we could change Prototype and Scriptaculous with a more advanced library. Two libraries made it on the short list: Dojo and the Yahoo UI Library. Both seem really profesional, well-architected and with a solid future.

After half of day of research, Dojo was rejected:

• It's huge, and people that use Dreamweaver don't want 600K of code to be required for their first page to render. Nor they want 200 files in the their project. Dojo provides a really nice and powerful building system, unfortunately unusable in our Dreamweaver related stuff
  
• It's not well documented
• It's hard to extend unless you invest massively in it (we've tried to create some widgets programatically and we weren't able to)

And the Yahoo UI Library was chosen:

• It's well documented.
• It's backed up by a suite of very clever guys and by a real company. (we've been impressed at the AjaxSeminar by this Yaho guy that talked 1 hour about autocomplete, in a very profesional manner)
• It has most of the stuff we need right now
• It has a brighter future
• Seems like Dreamweaver will know how to render the Yahoo widgets in design view

Now for our part. We're working on the Ajax Kore, a common library between the Ajax toolbox and the Kollection 4 that will provide us with required features:

• Some "lang" elements from Prototype that we think are good for writing code easy.
• Browser history (back and and forward browser buttons will work with Ajax requests)
• JavaScript incremental loading engine (Dojo had one but we think we can do at least better :). We also plan to generate a clean code in our pages for including lots of JS files and use the browser cache in order to minimize the number of requests to the server.
  
• Ajax Request error handler and loading indicator
  
• Web service support: server side object "Ajax stub" generator for transparent calls on the server from Ajax code
  
• Dom utility functions that extend the Yahoo provided ones
• Debugging library for our development needs
  

Along with Ajax Kore, each of our products will have some of their own Ajax sub-libraries for various subneeds:

MX Ajax Toolbox:

• Panels - a new concept we've created to load sections of pages using Ajax, while providing a fully degradable approach.
• • This means that our Ajax pages are indexable by google, work well with screen readers and are accesible.
• Several Ajax controls like Poll and Rating

MX Kollection 4

• Spry for dataset connectivity. To simplify the page markup and improve the loading speed for NeXTensio lists and forms.
  
• • We will make Kollection non-degradable (or make Spry degradable), as the product is used only in backends. We plan to extend Spry to make it work with JSON instead of XML, and also make it use our Ajax Kore for XHR requests and error handling.
• Form Validation library and other form utils that will make forms really easy to use

So we've ended up mash-ing up several Ajax libraries:

• Some basic prototype.js functions
  
• The Yahoo UI Library
• A part Spry - somehow we have to take it out and make it use the Yahoo UI and the Ajax Kore behind the scenes for achiving a unified platform
  
• Our internal library - Ajax Kore
  

We'll repost with our advancements, let's hope that everything will be ok and that we'll be able to create a small-footprint, usable framework.

Alexandru

With a heavy accent on Ajax, our main focus for MX Kollection 4 is to provide the perfect Dreamweaver extension for building web applications. Here is a preview of new features and improvements (you can also check out a very alpha version of Kollection 4 here):

• Ajax-enabled NeXTensio Lists and Forms
• NeXTensio List inline record editing "a la Access" on double-clicking a row.
• NeXTensio List navigation, sort and filter-as-you-type without page refresh
• Ajax-enabled Master/Detail support, Form Validation/Form Controls
• Multiple image upload with watermark and upload progress bar
• Download Counter, Captcha and Restricted Word List for secure forms
• Send e-mail with attachments
• Major performance boost in page loading and execution speed
• Compatibility with MX Ajax Toolbox
• and many others..

Fill in the survey and apply for the beta now!

Alexandru

http://www.tom-muck.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=137

I'm glad to see people using our library for upgrading their extensions for 802 compatibility, and I hope that Tom has forgiven us for the "overwriting files" problems we had in the past :)

Alexandru

http://blog.myfeedz.com/

Enjoy! And don't forget to join the myFeedz beta - we're gonna open the beta program to everybody that registered tomorrow.

Alexandru

As compared with the previous version, we did a lot of improvements and changes:

• the product now works with simple HTML pages and Dreamweaver templates (DWT)
• we've rewritten the CSS file from scratch for easier editing (you can even edit it directly from the Dreamweaver 8 CSS panel)
• we provide 23 CSS skins (PSD files included) for the 4 types of menus that are included (horizontal, vertical, tab and expandable)
• we have included a visual CSS skin builder with live preview - that will generate the CSS for you
• we have reduced the JS files size three times and doubled the rendering speed
• of course, we've preserved the database connectivity that made version 1 a hit
• several visual effects are now available (zoom, fade, slide)
• we've tested the menu thoroughly on as many browsers as possible (except IE 5 on MAC, we provide at least partial support on all browsers)
• and many others (better Dreamweaver UIs, rewritten documentation and tutorials, etc)

See a MX CSS Menus 2 live demo:
http://www.interaktonline.com/demos/MXCSSMenu/index.php 

Along with the CSS menus release, we've also released some other stuff you might be interested in:

• MX Kollection with a significant discount $99 off!
• MX Kommerce with a new look and a new license.
  
• And JSEclipse 1.5.2 has significant improvements for Yahoo! UI Widgets, Prototype and Script.aculo.us

Enjoy!

Alexandru

We're just uploading the products to the site now, but basically we're back again on the front of stable products. KTML 4.1.0, MX Kollection/Kommerce 3.6.5 and XML/CSV/RSS 1.8.0.

In the process, we've also developed a (free) library for other extension developers to port their products to 8.02. Tom Muck will use our library, and Bogdan is presenting it at TodCon to other extension developers that might need it.

Hope you'll enjoy the products. We'll now get back to our previous work.

Alexandru

After reviewing the situation, I've come to the conclusion that we have to take another approach. The correct advice is:

1. Everybody should upgrade to Dreamweaver 8.0.2, and start editing and reapplying their recordsets for adding the security measures. You should do this for all your sites - and re-upload them to your live servers.
   
2. If you use our extensions, you should stop using them until we release a new version - probably today

We're concentrating now on making sure our products work with Dreamweaver 8.0.2 and we hope to release today.

As we've discovered some ways to fix the compatibility issue, I'm also open to help any other extension developer fix their extensions. If you need a hand (even if we're competitors :), don't hesitate to send me a message and we'll gladly help.

Sincerely,

Alexandru

Tomorrow is a release day for us - we're releasing patches for most of our products (KTML 4.1.0, Kollection 3.6.5 and MX Kommerce 3.6.5 are the most important releases). We'll also release a significantly improved version of JSEclipse 1.5.2. And a new version of CSS Menus that is already used on the InterAKT site.

We were pretty confident in this release, until this morning. As we've seen that Dreamweaver 8.0.2 was just released, we've come up to the conclusion that some of our products are broken in this Dreamweaver version.

The issues comes from the corrections that were brought in the Dreamweaver recordset code - to fix some potential SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Seems like Dreamweaver 8.0.2 is using a "prepared statement"-like approach to cast all the SQL parameters to specific types. This approach, while beneficial for all the simple recordsets with a simple WHERE or ORDER condition, is overkill for our dynamic SQL's generated by NeXTensio for showing, searching and ordering information.

For now, if you upgrade to Dreamweaver 8.0.2 - DO NOT EDIT NEXTENSIO LIST RECORDSETS! Wait several days until we release MX Kollection 3.6.5.

Update: Full list of incompatible products:

• MX Query Builder - somehow broken
• NeXTensio - list from recordset is broken
• MX Table Sorter - completely broken
• MX Navigation Pack - completely broken
• (generally, please don't edit your recordsets to update them to 8.0.2)
  

We are working hard to fix all our products - but we feel that it would take much more than one day to fix them .... My advice if you are working hard with our products - DON'T upgrade yet to 8.0.2

Alexandru

So - I HATE FIREFOX this evening - it's a love-hate relationship

Gotta go to sleep :) Bye

Alexandru