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Flex 3, Air 1 and Blaze DS released

At FITC Amsterdam, Adobe announced that Flex 3, Air 1 and Blaze DS are now released. Adobe also demoed some of the upcoming features in Flash Player 10.

Today is a big day for developers. Not only is Flex 3 out of beta, but those interested in taking their web apps to the desktop, Adobe AIR is out of beta as well. But you don't have to build your AIR apps in Flex, or even Flash, all the API's including the one for developing AIR apps in DreamWeaver are out of labs today.

And if you are interested in building Flex apps without the Flex builder, the free open source Flex framework has been released today as well. And great thing about that, developers can contribute code back under the Mozilla Public License. Check it out here (yet another link required, which isn't up yet).

Todays product launch is also a little strange as it contains nothing really new. Some years ago, new products were really new. Then corporate blogging, product sneaks and public betas came along. Many avid Flex users have been using the Flex 3 and AIR beta for quite some time already. Todays news really only means that you can now buy the products you've used for free already. Expect a full review of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 on Flashmagazine soon. Adobe is already talking about Flex 4 so just as this launch is done, we'll start to hear snippets of what's planned for the new version.

As for news from the FITC keynote, there were not much but it is great fun to see Richard Galvan show how much further Hydra, the new timeline and the Inverse Kinetics have come already. Serge Jespers showed some of the really cool new Flex 3 features. If you want to follow what is happening in the Keynote here at FITC Amsterdam, Aral Balkan is blogging live just now. The Red5 team have also set up a nice streaming site where you can see random streams from the conference participants (this would be more fun if the wifi connection were faster and more stable at the event).

And last, but certainly not least, Adobe has also released the open source BlazeDS, which allows developers to more easily connect to server side systems in addition to pushing real-time data back to either Flex or AIR. You can grab that here.

Jens C Brynildsen (February 25th 2008)