Adobe is buying up a nifty little Web-based content management and creation system from a Swiss company called Day Software. There's still dancing to be done to get the deal finished, but it sounds like the offer is $240 million. Underneath the covers is an advanced and agile rapid application development platform that is based on OSGi and can be used with a browser-based IDE.

Through the mess of development buzzwords, that browser-based IDE is the one that caught my eye. I have to wonder if this will become the basis for future service-based development tools from Adobe? Certainly Photoshop and the graphics tools have been moving that way for some time, but Dreamweaver and the Flash development environments could use Day Software's CQ5 as a nice basis for future environments.

Of course, Day also has some compelling cloud capabilities, no doubt also a factor in Adobe's decision. As a package, it will be very interesting to see what Adobe does with all the technologies that make up CQ5. I'm unaware of any other platforms at Adobe that are based on OSGi. And because th CQ5 development environment is also available for Eclipse, this could mean even further engagement there for Adobe.