Macromedia Generator

Macromedia Generator was a server-side application that was developed by Macromedia to automatically generate graphics from Flash-based templates.

Product history
Originally named Flash Generator, the program ran on JRun and used Macromedia Flash 3 files as templates. Flash Generator entered into public beta testing in May 1998. It was released as Macromedia Generator on August 17, 1998. Once automated, it could build on the templates with provided data to generate animated GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, QuickTime movies, and Flash files for Macintosh or Windows computers. It also supported building charts.

Macromedia Generator 2 was released in October 4, 1999 and supported Flash 4-based files. The Enterprise Edition initially had a street price of US$30,000, but was repriced to $2,999 on April 10, 2001. The Developer Edition was priced at $999 per server. It also worked with Flash 5 and was included as part of Macromedia Flash 5 Generator Studio.

Discontinuation
Macromedia discontinued sales of Generator on December 31, 2002. Support for Generator ended in June 2003; the last update was version 2.6.

Macromedia sought to migrate users to Macromedia Flash MX, but Generator was discontinued without support for Flash MX. Developers found an alternative through JGenerator, an open-source Java application from JZox which offered similar functionality with support for Flash MX. On December 11, 2003, Macromedia signed a licensing agreement with JZox, which no longer sells JGenerator.