Flex 2 is out!
As you have probably heard, Flex 2 has been released. Everyone here is tired and excited. We have been working on this for a long time, and it is great to finally have it out there.
For those of you who have been following the public releases of Flex, the final release will not hold much in the way of surprises (although I will point out a few of my favorite changes below). However, if you step back a minute, the differences between Flex 1.5 and Flex 2 are pretty major. Imagine, if you will, that we had not done any public betas, and that all this news was coming at once:
- Brand new language based on the current draft of the ECMAScript Edition 4 spec that combines strong typing with the dynamic nature of JavaScript
- Completely rewrote the VM to be a modern, JIT compiled engine that runs 5-10x faster than before
- Reworked the framework to be more consistent, and thus easier to extend and subclass
- Added lots of new capabilities to the framework, including state management, transitions, new components, etc.
- Created a brand new tool based on Eclipse
- Decided to give the SDK away for free
- Decided to price the tool at $499 instead of the rumored $999
- Decided to give an express version of FDS
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited by Flex 2, and I’m very curious to see what people will build with it.
Ok. On to my favorite changes since beta 3.
More »