Macromedia Acquires Firefly

Last summer at FlashForward I was one of a handful of lucky people to win a copy - or, at least a future copy - of Firefly from CyberSage. Since then I've been downloading, and test driving, the suite of drag and drop Flash MX components which act as a web services gateway with hardly any ActionScript needed from the developer. A few months ago, the beta builds stopped being released, and their web site barely changed at all. Chances were, I thought, that Macromedia had probably purchased Firefly and was planning to bundle the components into the next update to the application. Well, I was halfway right.

Today the news came out that Macromedia has acquired the technology behind Firefly, and will soon be re-branding the tools as the "Flash MX Data Connection Kit" which will soon be available as a separate add-on tool. Worth keeping an eye on.