Adobe Flex 2 Shows Its Muscle

The new Flex 2 environment represents Adobe's effort to clean up browser-based development and make Flash Player 9 an even more desirable place for delivering business applications to consumers. Senior group manager Ben Watson of Adobe's Technical Evangelism Group started off our chat about what was the forthcoming release of YouTube as examples Watson cited. I asked about security, since the focus of Flex is on enterprises and business applications. Watson said Flex calls data based on the security of the data model. Security classes can be set within an application, so multiple users of the same app can be differentiated by their permitted level of access. The massive beta test of Flex 2 included the efforts of 70,000 testers in the program. Adobe crafted Flex 2 to allow developers to see verbose error reporting so apps can be fixed as needed. Developers do not have to write database controls in Flex. That along with the features of the environment should let non-Flash developers get into Flex quickly. There is still a learning curve developers will have to overcome to become proficient. Working toward that proficiency will reward the developer in the long run. Adobe has to meet the challenge of convincing developers to do things the Adobe way, and comply with ActionScript standards. Do so, and the payoff will be in the performance, Watson said. Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.