Flex 3 - The most important feature!
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Published
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
at
4:30 AM
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The Flex team is in full development of the next full release of Flex, Flex 3. The release is looking amazing but I wanted to reveal the most important feature today. Flex 3.0 targets the release version of Flash Player 9 and will be widely deployable to over 90% of computers, well over 1 Billion computers, the day it ships.The day you download Flex 3.0, you will be able to deploy 100% of the new features to the entire Flash Player 9 installed user base. Given release timing, Flash Player 9 should be installed on well over 90% of computers. This is the first time Adobe or Macromedia has released a development toolset targeting a widely deployed Flash Player and I believe it will have a dramatic effect on the Flex marketplace as a whole. I am seeing a huge surge in Flex development today and the delivery of Flex 3.0 will only accelerate this growth.
Companies moving to Flex for cross-platform web and desktop application development can rest easy investing in Flex today and tomorrow. In choosing Flash Player 9 for the deployment target of Flex 3.0, Adobe is making a larger commitment to supporting a longer application life-cycle. Companies developing Flex applications will be able to utilize more advanced development tools while deploying compatibly to Flash Player 9. As future players arrive, deployed applications will work seamlessly given our fine grained support for SWF backward compatibility.
In many ways, I believe this is the right choice for Flex long term. As our market is by majority business applications, we need to focus on wide deployment and compatibility first and on new player dependent runtime features second. Flex should always deploy into the fat of the Flash Player adoption curve and it is my opinion that we should always target the player that is 90% deployed. If that means that Flex 3,4,5 ship targeting Flash Player 9 all the better for developers and companies. Honestly there are a ton of features that need to be added into Flex independent of the runtime and above the compiler. When Flash Player 10 hits 90%, Flex should target Flash Player 10 in all future releases. The market that Flex is targeting requires us to provide better development tools for productive software development always delivering to widely compatible runtimes.
So what is being added for Flex 3.0?
I will be demoing some Flex 3.0 features at the 360Flex keynote. Hold onto your hat, you ain't seen nothing yet!
Go Flex!
Ted :)
p.s. Dear loyal readers, please pardon the comments from my new MSFT fan club. Since they are trying to catch up to Adobe, I better get used to their comments and spam on my blog.