Adobe Ships New Flash Platform Tools, Social Service

Adobe Systems has announced the availability of Adobe Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder software, next generation Flash Platform tooling for building multiplatform rich Internet applications (RIAs). In addition, Adobe added a new Social service to its recently introduced Adobe Flash Platform Services.

Flash Builder 4, formerly known as Adobe Flex Builder, is an Eclipse-based development tool for building multiplatform rich Internet applications (RIAs) and content using the open-source Flex framework. Developers can build more intuitive Web applications that enable customers, partners and employees to better understand and use data, Adobe officials said.

In addition, Flash Builder 4 accelerates development and testing of RIAs and content, providing new and improved coding and testing capabilities, while allowing designers and developers to more efficiently collaborate using new integrated workflows with Adobe Creative Suite. And Flash Builder 4 enables enhanced integration with a variety of data back ends -- including PHP, ColdFusion, Java and Adobe LiveCycle -- and easy introspection and consumption of Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based services.

“Companies are under extraordinary pressure to keep their competitive edge," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Adobe Platform Business Unit, in a statement. "The Flash Platform helps companies deploy business-critical applications to a wide audience, while ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder truly accelerate the development process. We look forward to seeing what our talented developer community creates with these latest additions in our developer ecosystem.”

Chris Griffith, a staff engineer at Qualcomm, said: "Adobe Flash Builder 4 and the Flex framework have become invaluable in Qualcomm's user experience efforts. With the release of Flash Builder 4, it has enabled us to build projects – from mobile to Web to the desktop – faster and in a cleaner, more concise fashion. As a result, our team can now explore new ideas without the previous overhead of recoding user interface elements."

Meanwhile, Adobe also has introduced an updated version of its open source Flex 4 framework, which includes a new component architecture for RIAs providing separation of appearance and functionality, enabling each to be changed independently without affecting the other. It provides a new skinning and component architecture, code-named Spark, which builds on top of the existing MX architecture, providing a more efficient mechanism for developers and designers to work together to control the appearance of their Flex applications.

“Creating the UI components with the new skinning architecture in Adobe Flash Builder is significantly faster – making my job much easier and less stressful – and lets us produce more creative, compelling interfaces," said Jason Ervin, a Flex and Flash developer at Spiceworks.

Emmanuel Laborde, director of engineering at SAP, said, “When our developers work with Flex, they can take a more creative, visual approach to building applications, and it shows in quality and interactivity of the end product.”

And Jaanus Kase, an engineer in the human-computer interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “I’ve worked in other environments like HTML and JavaScript, but Adobe Flex literally takes half the time to create each iteration. With Flex, I can focus on delivering an engaging user experience, versus spending non-productive time debugging, working on speed optimizations, or worrying about browser compatibility issues.”

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