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June 10, 2007
Flex 3, AIR and Flash Player Betas Now Available!
The first public beta release of Flex 3, AIR, and Flash Player 9 update 3 is now available on Adobe labs. This provides an early look at what will be a very important release. I'm sure there will be lots of coverage about this, but here are some of the things that I think are really important. You can get more info and the software itself at the following URLs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/
Flex 3
The backdrop of Flex 3 is of course that it is going open source and that the community will be able to get much more involved with how it develops (pun intended)! As part of this movement, we've made the bugbase public, now. You can access it at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex. What are the important features that you can start filing bugs on? Though I can't say that there will be any bugs in the follow areas, here are some of my favorite new things in Flex 3.
We've created a way for a dramatic reduction in the size of SWF files by adding a way for Flex and some other libraries to dynamically linked and shared across applications, similar to DLL's on Windows or Shared Libraries on other systems. This means that end users will only have to download the Flex Framework library once.
For people who like to work with code, we've added in a number of refactoring operations that work across ActionScript and MXML. To aid in the creation of high performance apps we've added both memory and performance profilers to Flex Builder.
We've also really improved how one hooks up to data. There are data wizards that will generate both client and server code to hook up to existing database tables. On the server side we'll be supporting Cold Fusion, Java, PHP and my old love, ASP.NET.
For those of you consuming Web Services from your Flex apps, we've added web service introspection which will auto-generate client side proxy classes from WSDL signatures. This will handle complex types often returned from web services. The big benefit here is that it enables complete code hinting and compiler verification when working with web services.
Flex 3 has a number of features for making it easier to build great looking apps. There is integration with Adobe Creative Suite 3, so that you can easily import skins created in CS 3 apps by using a wizard that will generate the code to assign the assets to components. There is also the ability to create Flex components directly in Flash CS 3!
There is also a visual CSS editor that's really cool and number of enhancements to design view such as Pan and Zoom tools, and an improved constraints system and editor and much greater fidelity for fonts and item renderers.
Perhaps my favorite feature is the new Skin states feature, which was something I was pushing for. This really helps the Flex/Flash integration but will become even more important in the future!
Of course, there is also a lot of support in Apollo for building apps that run on AIR -- I love the way that sounds!
AIR
The Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR is the official name of what was codenamed Apollo and there are a lot of new features for Beta 1!
There is native OS drag and drop support as well as support for multi-windowed applications. We've also added complete rendering support for HTML content courtesy of the integrated WebKit HTML engine.
In addition to providing access to local file system, one of the big new features of AIR is that it integrates a local database engine so that you can store complex data locally.
Of course there is complete support in Flex and Flex Builder for creating AIR apps. We've added AIR specific components to Flex for things such as Windowing and HTML, and Flex Builder has an AIR project type. This will auto package everything up so that building apps is really easy.
Flash Player 9 Update 3
While this piece of technology has the most modest name of the bunch, it has a number of really compelling features.
There are enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality. While his feature is not available on Linux in Beta 1, it will be available in a later release. What is there for Linux is full-screen mode, which is especially good news for people watching video on Linux.
There is also faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs, which of course are becoming commonplace.
Finally, the ability to cache the Flex Framework as a common platform component is really enabled by the Flash Player. This is a really major feature that we'll be taking advantage of in exciting ways in the future!
All in all, this is an exciting release of a number of important technologies, so dig in and enjoy!
Posted by Mark Anders at 10:10 PM | Comments (1)