Lee Brimelow was nice enough to create some introductory videos. Check them out at gotoAndLearn(). They demo some of the newest features, including the 3D Effects, new Sound API and the new Local File Support. Adobe’s Press release is here.

• the Apollo SDK will be free
• the Apollo’s compiler will be free”

Flex now has a free compiler and Apollo will tie in nicely.

Right from the word go it was obvious that Macromedia had spent an enormous amount of effort improving the feature set, reducing wait times and refining the user interface. Our presenter for flash was so impressed by the new feature set that he struggled to control his excitement. I’ll cover the key points, but seeing there are so many changes I strongly suggest a visit to the Macromedia website.

With every new version of Studio, the flash player also gets an upgrade hence Flash Player 8. The latest Flash player is amazing with hugely impressive speed increases, most notably on MacOS. We were shown CPU intensive tasks such as fractacals, 3D motion and real time video effects. Oh and by the way VIDEOS NOW GET AN ALPHA CHANNEL (I sound like the Flash presenter)!!! This opens the possibility to create incredible interactive media without additional filesizes as it is rendered in real-time by the flash player. Other enhancements include an engine to nicely render fonts, several filters (most likely stolen from Photoshop, more on that later) and a cool new feature to facilitate complete control over motion tweens. The examples and demos we were provided with were certainly the best demonstrations to showcase Flash’s new feature set.

Dreamweaver also got a massive overhaul. Macromedia actually took the time to consider us coders (we’ve got our own toolbar now for the code view). We now can enjoy features such as code collapsion (the biggie) and common-coding task shortcuts. Dreamweaver also now sports background FTP. Previously we were succumbed to waiting whilst Dreamweaver took center stage and impressed us with progessive uploading screens. Unfortunately we no longer get that avid coffee break which ironically extended itself to an hour away from the desk whilst Dreamweaver was idle for forty minutes.

Macromedia also hired an engineer for two years to work on the HTML rendering engine used in Dreamweaver. They could of used Gecko like Nvu (formerly Mozilla Composer), but rather have created their own terrific renderer with very slick features. Users can now use a zoom function to create pixel-perfect layouts. The CSS editor in design-mode has also been condensed. It is now accessible from one panel rather than a cumbersome three.

We were also shown a small sample of Dreamweaver’s support for XSLT, XML and XPATH. Even if users have no prior knowledge of these technologies Dreamweaver can assist teaching or completely handle the code generation for us. I currently use XSLT occasionally, but not frequently enough to grasp a strong understanding for use in more professional environments. Dreamweaver’s XML support would certainly be advantageous in assisting me with these technologies.

It was evident in all products that the merger with Adobe has possibly opened up a shared code agreement in which many of Photoshop’s notable features can now be found in most of Studio 8. This may or may not be true, but Flash certainly contains a hell of alot more filters!

Pricing has also been revised for this release weighing in at about $1,500 for a full license and the various other upgrade paths. Freehand has notably been dropped, but is still available separately (I never used it anyway). On the whole Studio 8 is a very, very nice software suite and I will defiantely be upgrading on it’s release later this month. You should too!

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Devnet resources can be found at: www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex.

Other resources include:

www.cflex.net
Christophe Coenraets Blog

Target Audience

The good thing about flex is that all output is sent to the client through the flash SWF format. Flash player is currently installed on 98% of internet connected machines. This makes large and cross-platform deployments a breeze. Flex is also 100% native Java and can be deployed across all the major J2EE application servers including Apache Tomcat (apparently Macromedia has released plans about a .NET version too).

The IDE

Flex also has an IDE counterpart called Flex Builder (very creative naming schemes). Flex Builder is modelled on the success of Dreamweaver MX, hence includes the interface we are all very familiar with. It is possible to use Flex Builder for all your old Dreamweaver projects as your existing sites are imported and the default panel layout can be changed to resemble Dreamweaver. This is providing Dreamweaver MX is available on your machine.

Stock Components

Flex is bundled with the successful components from Flash MX 04 Professional. It also brings a few kids to the scene as well. Input forms with validation, buttons, data grids, trees, tabs and media players are all available for use.

The Language (MXML)

Once again Flex is a presentation server. It provides a layer to sit on top of existing dynamic data applications. The layout and control of your flex application is handled through Macromedia’s XML-based language called MXML (after its codename). MXML is a breeze to learn and compiles your Flex applications on the fly. It supports object caching to reduce load times on further requests.

Design Toolkit

Since primarily I am a developer, I am unable to evaluate the full design potential of Flex. However – you can see for yourself. Flex does have native support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I love the inclusion of CSS as it makes the transition from being a web developer quite easy. You can simply attach a CSS style sheet to your MXML code and control the layout and style of components using standard CSS classes and rules. CSS can completely ’skin’ the look and feel of your application to your hearts content.

Licensing Options

Flex is a great application, but commercial-licensing starts at $12,000 for a dual-CPU setup. This is a big cost and discourages a large user base, not to mention a supportive community. Fortunately they created the non-commercial license where bloggers, educators and students can have access to a free Flex and Flex Builder license. Conclusion I think Flex is a powerful tool that needs to be made available to the larger portions of the market. The non-commercial license idea was indeed great to stimulate growth and development. I still feel that Flex is too tightly integrated with existing Macromedia products such as JRun. Flex should be more compatible with other popular programming languages other than Java. I hope to complete some powerful applications soon to test its full capability.

Rich Internet Applications boost ROI by combining the rich GUI of the desktop with the universal reach of the web. This next-generation approach improves the end-user experience, while reducing bandwidth and server load.

Macromedia have recently released the Flex presentation server. Flex implements an xml-based markup language used to generate rich internet applications. These applications are delievered to the client through the flash player format (swf).

Looks like it might be time to create an open-source project with similar goals. The possibility seems realistic for 2005.