Macromedia announce Flex 2.0, Flash Player 8.5 and Actionscript 3.0

Further to Macromedia's repositioning of Flash as the 'Flash Platform' they have now laid out their plans for the future of Rich Internet Applications.

David Wadhwani's article on the forthcoming Flex 2.0 includes the announcement of Flash Player 8.5 and plans for Actionscript 3.0. The second sentence in the devnet article really tells where Macromedia want to go with Flex: "The Flex 2 product line provides the next generation of developer tools and services that enable developers everywhere to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) on the Flash Platform." Today you may be using Flash to create your applications, but tomorrow you will be using Flex. Flex Builder will be priced at less than $1000. This will allow a wider crowd to learn Flex and that is certainly of importance to Macromedia. Flex competes with technologies with huge developer crowds, so if you want to get in on something early and maybe land a sweet job - Flex is certainly a product to watch!

Flash Player 8.5 explains a picture from a Flash conference about a year ago where a Macromedia employee by accident showed a Properties-panel that said the file used "Actionscript 3" (AS3). Ordinary users will not get AS3 in the Flash IDE just yet, but if you use Flex Builder/Eclipse or the Enterprise version, you can use AS3 to speed up your applications. As opposed to AS1 and AS2, AS3 is fully ECMA compliant and much stricter. To support this, extra debugging capabilities are added. It will be executed from a separate virtual machine, so the Flash Player will now consist of "two cores". One for AS1 and AS2 and one for AS3. How much faster will the new Player be then? "Significantly faster" according to David Wadhwani of Macromedia. Macromedian Mark Anders claims 5-10x speed increase for code execution and that's serious.

So when will you get to play with these new features? Alpha versions of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 are expected to be available for download on October 17 in conjunction with the MAX 2005 developer conference. If you are going there, make sure you check this out! The alpha version of Flex Enterprise Services 2 will be available later in the development cycle. All the products are expected to be commercially available in the first half of calendar 2006. Both the devnet article and this one are good reads.
Read more at devnet

 

 

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