I'm sure everyone has by now heard the news that Interakt has been purchased by Adobe. Interakt has recently been my main competitor, but in the DW extension development community fellow extension developers usually maintain a pretty good relationship. They helped me out of a jam when Adobe released the 8.0.2 updater which severely trashed server side extensions, and it was fun hanging out and drinking with them at conferences. I wish them the best of luck going forward.

For more information on the acquisition, check these links:

• Scott Fegette's blog
• Alexandru's blog
• Bogdan's blog
• Interakt FAQ
• Discontinued extensions

What does this mean for extensions and extension development? I'm not quite sure yet, but having someone in Adobe familiar with the extension development community cannot be a bad thing. Interakt has already provided much of the code that has become part of DW 8.

One of the key problems with the company Macromedia before being integrated into Adobe was that the program APIs would change from version to version. This was true in Dreamweaver, as well as Flash. After Adobe took over Dreamweaver, we had a huge API change from 8.0.1 to 8.0.2 that broke many extensions. Dreamweaver is a volatile program, patched together with hundreds of thousands of lines JavaScript and HTML, and has become in some ways even more volatile with the multi-user configuration setup introduced in DW MX 6.0. I can only hope that this situation will eventually change as the program becomes more stable and standardized, and the core team of JavaScript programmers from Interakt, familiar with advanced extensibility and the various problems of past Dreamweaver code, becomes part of Adobe.

Congrats to Interakt and Adobe.