Adobe just pushed out a great Engage article on the technical underpinnings of Sprout. Kevin and Matthew did a great job to explain how we built Sprout using Flex.

by Julie Campagna

What is a sprout? It's not a small plant — not in the Web 2.0 world anyway. Sprouts are interactive and portable chunks of interactive content. "Some people call them widgets, mashups, or mini sites, but we just call them sprouts," explains Sprout Builder CTO Kevin Hughes.

Sprout Builder is a web-based widget development application (or authoring platform) that enables anyone to quickly and easily build interactive content. Users create sprouts by combining text, shapes, and prebuilt interactive content, and then generating a SWF file that can be embedded within any website, blog, or social networking site.

Based in Honolulu, Hawaii, the Sprout Builder team designed and built the service using Adobe Flex 3. In this article, you will learn about the technologies that support and power the Sprout Builder service.

The Sprout team demonstrated the service onstage at DEMO '08, building a sprout in less than five minutes for the band Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals.

Many requirements, one technology platform

SAN FRANCISCO, April 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Web 2.0 EXPO BOOTH 545 -- Sprout (http://www.sproutbuilder.com/), the premier platform for easily creating, publishing and managing rich Flash content, including widgets, minisites, banners and more, today launched a Software Development Kit (SDK) allowing third parties to integrate their applications with Sprout. To learn more, visit http://www.sproutbuilder.com/developers.

Web services and developers that integrate their services with Sprout benefit by introducing their service to Sprout's growing user base, and by empowering their existing users to mashup their service within Sprout for distribution across any number of web sites. The Sprout SDK has universal appeal as it uses XML and JavaScript, making integration easy and giving users full control over the editing of custom properties.

Also announced today, Sprout v1.5 includes components for Google Forms, PollDaddy, Ribbit, Seesmic and Twitter, making it easy to collect data, survey audiences, place phone calls, or show off vlogs or Twitters directly from a sprout. Also released were several new animation effects, a new 'Help' panel with tutorials and 'how-to' videos, and an enhanced Undo/Redo/History function.

"The Sprout SDK allows all types of web services to easily integrate into our platform, joining the likes of Twitter, PollDaddy, Google, Yahoo! and others," said Carnet Williams, CEO of Sprout. "We look forward to working with additional partners on the Sprout platform."