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June 28, 2006
Flex 2 and Future Web Application Development
Flex 2 has been released (CNET coverage here, TechCrunch coverage, Digg the story). You can buy it from the Adobe online store for $499, or $749 with the charting components included. The SDK for Flex is free, as in beer, and there's a free version for Flex Data Services included as well.
This release marks an important milestone for Adobe, as my colleague Bill McCoy has discussed in his blog. Some great web applications have been built with Ajax, but increasingly a number of them are using Flash in areas that the browser cannot handle: rich media integration (You Tube, Google Video and others use Flash to stream video), saving data locally (using the Flash Shared Object), applications that demand higher performance from the client (Flash code is compiled as opposed to Ajax / HTML code). Google Finance is a great example of using Flex and Ajax together, and using Flash where it makes sense (rich graphics drawn on the client).
Yes, you can do some very cool things with Flex right now. However, future development looks even brighter from an Adobe perspective. Apollo will provide additional APIs to web applications that will allow them to integrate into the operating system - users will launch web applications just as they would a regular desktop application (with icons on the desktop / dock / taskbar), the ability to save large amounts of data on the local machine (not limited to the 100K default for the shared object), and perhaps most importantly the ability to develop an application once and then have it run on multiple operating systems (we've committed to making Apollo cross platform). Watch a developer week session about Apollo.
Take that view of the future along with the ability to create mobile applications that run on FlashLite using the same set of technologies. Plus, unlike other languages, building a mobile application for FlashLite will work across a variety of devices - anywhere that the FlashLite player is installed. (Did you miss the announcement of the FlashLite deal with Verizon?) Can you see why JD was so excited about this deal earlier this year?
Here are a few other links about the release:
The source code derived from the Eclipse code is available for download.
A version of Flash Player 9 for Linux is underway. Follow the Penguin.swf blog for more information.
Flex.org is a new site that launched today as well, with resources for the community related to Flex.
FlexCoders.net has a list of Flex developers, if you're interested in building out a Flex project and need some help. If you need work, register there.
For historical Flash designers / developers, Adobe Labs now has a preview of Flash Professional 9 with ActionScript 3.
technorati tags:adobe, flex, ria, ajax, opensource, flashlite, mobile, apollo
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Comments
Ciao Mike,
I am very interested in the Flash Lite-Apollo-Flex "Platform".
Getting to code once run everywhere especially in Mobile world it will be a major win.
Alessandro
Not quite ALL of the worlds developers are rejoicing, no? Adobe's growing NEGLECT Way to go you knuckleheads!
[There's a lot of us waiting for it - Mike]
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