Adobe Releases Flex 2.0 Beta

An anonymous reader writes "The battle between Microsoft and Adobe continues as Adobe releases the beta of Flex 2.0. This comes just a few days after Microsoft released a preview of Sparkle. From the article: 'Adobe today released the beta version of Flex 2.0, the latest software from Adobe Labs. The release follows the Alpha test release in earlier January. Aimed at developers of Internet content, the beta version of Flex includes Flash Player 8.5 client, Flex Framework 2.0, as well as Flex Builder 2.0, Flex Enterprise Services 2.0 and Flex Charting Components.' Some of the cool new features include the ability to view source so you can see how the Flash application was built, and an announcement today that some of the tools to build Flash applications will be available for free."

Comments

Eclipse goodness!

[DamienMcKenna]

Note that the IDE is based on the Eclipse platform! Good work Adobe!

Damien

Flex = a big huh?

[Peganthyrus]

I used to be a professional Flash geek and I can't tell what the hell Flex is. I dunno if this is an inherited Macromedia name or an Adobe name - probably Macromedia, as I found a lot of their tool names to be cryptic and uninspiring. Blah blah 'rich applications' blah blah blah. Blah blah same hype as 'AJAX' except with Flash wedged in.

But Flash has been going down this "platform" route for the past several revisions, with increasingly more annoying UI in the editor for animators - the 5->MX transition threw a bunch of speedbumps right in the middle of the animation workflow, and they seem to be slated to linger forever. I keep hoping the Adobe buyout will mean they actually fix the editor UI to not require about twice the clicks it used to for basic symbol-oriented animation...

Re:Flex = a big huh?

[abigor]

This stuff isn't for simple animations. It's for creating rich web apps - imagine something with the interactivity of a normal desktop app, but it runs in the browser. Our UI team is using it, and I have to say, it's impressive.

So it's a combination of ActionScript (i.e. ECMAScript), plus a bunch of widgets, plus an event loop, etc. It's really the only game in town if you want to write desktop-style apps that live in the browser - a big advantage, for example, is that you can open a socket to the server and receive asynchronous events, unlike an AJAX-based app, which must poll.

That's not to say it's without problems. The UI guys report a buggy ide to be the most maddening thing. Plus, of course, it's proprietary, which may be a problem for some.

Re:Flex = a big huh?

[CyricZ]

Taking a quick glance at the source snippets, that OpenLaszlo system looks like a major pain in the ass to use. Its misuse of XML is quite disturbing. Code like that just isn't maintainable, and for serious applications a lack of maintainability is completely unacceptable.

One doesn't want to judge a language or application framework purely by its syntax, but when one sees something like that, one just knows that it's a bad idea.