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

Behind the curve

[archnerd]

$ flex --version
flex version 2.5.4

Eclipse goodness!

[DamienMcKenna]

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

Damien

steroids on a diet?

[tverbeek]

Flex, internally, is "AJAX on steroids," .... Flex is "Microsoft Vista on a diet,"]

Based on this, I'd say that Mister Flex is taking serious medical risks, and should seek the immediate care of a physician.

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?

[sisina]

It's really the only game in town if you want to write desktop-style apps that live in the browser

I'm curious to know if your team looked into OpenLaszlo. There are some pretty nice apps built on it—the Behr Paint ColorSmart tool used an early version (before they opened the source), and I think Pandora is built on it as well. I'd really like to hear from someone who's compared the two. I have a database-driven Flash project coming up, and I can buy Flex if I have a good reason to, but if Laszlo will work it would sure be nice.

What Flex Is.

[Tariq Ahmed]

For those asking: At a real basic level, Flex is an XML language that let's you compile Flash applications. Developing an application in Flash directly is extremely time consuming, and not suited for developer types.

On a more complex level, Flash based Flex applications are robust interactive SOA applications with the ability to easily hook into various data services (JMS/Messaging, AMF[POJOs,OpenAMF via PHP, Coldfusion CFCs], XML over HTTP, and WebServices/SOAP).

So you can make rich desktop like applications with all the great stuff like drag and drop, interact with video, webcams, microphones, key events like CTRL and Function keys. Thin clients, where the app loads once. But have the deployment ease of a web application, and are platform agnostic (unix,mac,windows,pdas,cellphones,etc....).

Though the best way to see what it's all about is to look at live applications on the web:

http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/Yahoo Maps
http://www.thoughtfaqtory.com/flex/mxnaviewer/main .swfBlog Reader
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/pent/flickr/PhotoSea rch.htmlFlickr PhotoSearch.