Adobe today announced the Cocomo public beta, a technology which allows developers to add real-time social capabilities into their web applications.
Cocomo basically leverages the Adobe Connect back-end to deliver features such as Data Messaging (think traditional Remote SharedObjects), VoIP Audio, Webcam Video, File Sharing, Text Chat and so on. The tool is provided in shape of a developer framework and component set that can be used to build Flex based applications.
Cocomo is definitely a very cool platform and on the surface it makes it easy to build real-time applications that may otherwise be quite difficult to build. But I also see an enormous overlap between Cocomo and Flash Media Server.
This comes as no surprise since Adobe Connect uses Flash Media Server as its foundation, and Cocomo applications feel very familiar to the experienced FMS developer. A key differentiators is the fact that Cocomo is a pure client side framework, meaning the developer has no access to the server side code. This is not a big issue since Adobe is aiming to provide all required functionality without the developer requiring access to any server side logic.
What concerns me are Adobe’s efforts to push further into the domain of their own developers, and potentially competing with them on a playing field on which the referee may be playing for the opponent. I’m not yet convinced whether Cocomo will open more doors than it will close, and it is clear that any application built using Cocomo is competing with applications that were previously built with FMS. Undoubtedly this will drive some developers away from FMS since Cocomo is now the suggested way to build collaborative applications.
Having taken part in the Cocomo pre-release program I have had the opportunity to use the technology first hand and the team at Adobe (many of which are familiar faces) have done an incredibly good job. The platform cannot be faulted from a technical standpoint. No, it’s the business perspective that worries me greatly at a time where Adobe is trying hard to drive more developers towards FMS.
I’m a huge fan of online collaboration and real-time applications on the web, and that’s what got me most excited about FMS in the first place. I now seem to be receiving mixed messages from Adobe about which one of their platforms to choose, and right now I must say that I am highly skeptical about the approach that they are taking with Cocomo. I understand the business decisions behind it, but I don’t think I agree with them.
