The Joy of Flex

Phil Costa, group product manager for Flex, came by yesterday from the Adobe office in Newton. We showed him some of our latest and greatest stuff, and he briefed us on what’s coming in the next release of Flex. None of this stuff is under NDA, and probably all of it is out there on the web somewhere, but it was great to get it all in one gulp. This is certainly not a complete list and any errors are my own.

These are some of the areas they are investing in for the fall release, code named Moxie.

• Designer/developer workflow, to support more expressive designs as well as the movement between Flex and the various CS tools
• Apollo, mostly concentrated in the tool chain so developers can build debug and attach to a running apollo app. Also putting in the framework changes so that it can behave differently when under Apollo.
• Catchall platform stuff: tool as a platform, and SDK features that customers have been requesting
• Data, combination of getting-started wizards to help people migrate from a web app world and investments in data components (List, DataGrid, charting extensions)

Some specifics of the tool and platform work:

• There’s a group of people in Massachusetts working on a profiler. It’s going to be implemented as part of the Flex plug-in and provide both memory and performance profiling.
• They are working on support for the Eclipse refactoring and trying to hit the 80% cases: find all usages, rename methods, rename variables. Not doing more advanced things like extract method. Designed to work across projects so if you have libraries and modules it should work across them.
• Also working on integrating modules more fully. Modules were a late feature and they focused on making sure they didn’t break things. UI and intelligence are coming to help developers structure their code into modules.
• Working on speeding up the incremental compile and fixing a bugs around that.
• Looking at possibly making some incremental enhancements to the debugger, may or may not happen for the next release: mouse-over to get variables, execute arbitrary expressions.
• Working on extensibility in Flex Builder, primarily for third-party component developers who want to build custom components and extend the design view to support them.

Framework:

• Improving localization story. Currently you have to build separate SWFs for multiple languages. They are going to use the same approach for runtime style support to do runtime language support. It won’t be swappable at runtime, but it will be loadable at runtime so that you don’t have to have a full set of SWFs for each language like you do now. (Almost no one wants to be able to flip between languages at runtime.)

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Apollo, Flex Builder, Virtual Ubiquity