March 2006 Archives

Today we announced the immediate availability of Flex 2.0 beta 2 on Adobe Labs. Eric Anderson has prepared a very informative New Features in Flex 2.0 Beta 2 article that is a must read for active users of beta 1. Some highlights of beta 2:

* Flex Enterprise Services is now Flex Data Services and, in addition to a refresh of the existing downloads, we are providing new Solaris and platform-independent Java downloads.
* The Flex framework can be downloaded seperately as part of the new Flex SDK 2.0.
* New ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0 are available for download.

In addition to all of the new code and content changes, beta 2 also marks the start of the exciting Flex Developer Derby contest. The top applications in six different cateogries will win great prizes. If you are using Flex 2.0 and you have built some cool apps, please submit them. As an added bonus, the first 25 submissions that are approved and posted on the Showcase Gallery will receive a $50 Amazon gift certificate.

A prerelease of the XMP Toolkit, version 4.0 was released on Adobe Labs on March 9th.

The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing, and leveraging this valuable metadata opening the door for more efficient job processing, workflow automation, and rights management, among many other possibilities.

View more information about the XMP Toolkit 4.0 prerelease: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/xmptoolkit/

Earlier today we released the Flex Ajax Bridge (FABridge) on Adobe Labs. With the FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding.

For more information, checkout What Is the Flex Ajax Bridge?, which includes an overview and links to a ZIP download and sample application, and Ajax Client for Flex Data Services (ACFDS), a JavaScript library that will enable Ajax developers to access the messaging and data management capabilities of Flex Data Services directly from JavaScript. There is also a video demo of ACFDS available.

This week we released a new set of seven ActionScript 3.0 Libraries on Labs to assist the Flex user community with creating content using the Flex 2.0 beta. The projects are listed below:

corelib
FlexUnit
Flickr
Mappr
RSS and Atom libraries
Odeo
YouTube

We hope that the libraries mentioned above will be a valuable resource for you while developing Flex applications.