The spirit sustains the stone  

Jeeps, how hard is it to keep up with all the projects Adobe have on the go. When I first heard about Cocomo and then saw on Labs ‘Build real-time social Apps’ I just saw the word ’social’ and thought it was some sort of API for facebook, made an mental note, put in on the ‘backburner’ and never gave it a look. OOops!

It wasn’t till Nigel Pegg from Adobe (I still remember his AS1 Tree Component with fondness back in the day) left a comment on my last post that I’ve eked out some time to look into it.  All I can say is WOW.

Cocomo has the abilies to be used an alternative approach to developing/deploying multi-user applications/games  as opposed FMS. This has the potential to address a lot stumbling blocks I’ve had with multi-user development. You don’t have to write server-side code and handle all the stuff to do with connection fall-backs, load balanced servers etc. so hopefully a lot of the pain is removed ;)  delagating all that chod work away is a god send for me ;)

After 2 Days I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how it works and have most of the demos hooked up and working. I can now happily start thinking about developing mulituser projects with a lot more confedence (hoping Adobe sort out a business model that isn’t cost prohibitive ;) ). Nigel and the team have done a really outstanding job with the API, it’s very thoughtfully implemented.

The links below have the best debates, some of which look quite delicate for the FMS Dev community. As Adobe roll out more and more services; Cocomo, Stratus, Connection Pro, Live Cycle… It’s going to be important that they explain and define the services a bit better as there looks like quite a bit of crossover, making me wonder if there could be one service that rules them all? It’s going to be interesting to see how this goes; If the service can give enough control to devs, if it remains robust with 20,000 connections, how secure it is (I wonder what info can be garnered like ’Account Shared Secret’ using Charles proxy?) … As I move from the demos to my first app I hope it stands up to scrutiny. 

If, like me, you haven’t given Cocomo your attention I recommend you take a look.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cocomo/

http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2008/11/17/cocomo-public-beta

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2008/11/of_referees_and_wrenches_cocom.html