Last Night's Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour in Atlanta

Posted At : January 23, 2008 4:05 PM | Posted By : Leif Wells
Related Categories: Flex, On AIR Bus Tour, Flex Builder, Rich Internet Applications

I thoroughly enjoyed last night's Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour event here in Atlanta. There were a ton of people at the event and I believe that everyone had a great time. It was exceptionally great to see some faces that I had not seen in years (more than ten years in a couple of cases). As always, getting to see everyone was great.

Special thanks to John Mason, president of the AFFUG and to Adobe for setting up everything.

The thing about Ben Forta, the presenter at last night's event, is that you don't want the event to end. Ben keeps relating relevant information to you about whatever the event's topic happens to be. Ben is a wealth of information — that is, the information that he can reveal at an event, not that people didn't try to get release dates out of him — and I know that whenever Ben comes to town that it's a must see event.

I am truly excited about Flex 3. I've been using Flex Builder 3 full time since the first public release and have been enjoying the experience. I do not have a specific favorite Flex 3 feature, really. I just love all of the efficiencies they have put into Flex Builder; things like smoothing out the designer/developer workflow (while we wait for "Thermo"), code refactoring, and a few wizards that I have found surprisingly useful. I think the feature that will have the most impact on Flex developers in the long run will be what Adobe calls Persistent Framework Caching. That is the feature that allows for reduction of application size by making the Flex runtime library available separately for download. If your user has visited another Web application that uses Flex 3, they will not have to download the Flex library as it will be called from the browser's cache. Adobe says that this can reduce the download size by up to 500k.

As for AIR, I've really enjoyed using it. I have been lucky enough to have already used AIR in client work (yes, before AIR has been released — I know, it's crazy). The SQLite engine is great. Being able to read and write files on the system, associate file extensions with your AIR application, and being able to use native windows and the system tray or dock are all great features. Sometimes they remind me of the work I did years ago using Flash MX and Screenweaver and/or SWF Studio Pro (which are still very valuable given some of AIR's security restrictions).

All in all, last night was a great way to re-energize me for the upcoming final release of Flex 3and AIR.