Flex 2.0 beta on the way

If you like Flex 2.0 Alpha, wait until you read this ... new functionality added to Flex 2.0 Beta is on the way … Among other things, and I would agree that Flex 1.0 may become a little slow … check this out:

For example, I showed start up performance for a fairly good sized business portal style app with charts and grids and a bunch of data. In Flex 1.5 with Flash Player 7, it takes 3.52 seconds to launch and fully display. At MAX, I showed the same app ported to Flex 2 starting up in 0.95 seconds, which is much, much faster. Well, Big Dave showed that we haven't stopped improving performance and the current build starts up in 0.59 seconds!

Big Dave then showed the scrolling app, which displays a datagrid that makes very heavy use of custom cell renderers and times how long it takes to scroll to the 50th record. In the Flex 1.5 version is takes an excruciating 15.90 seconds to run. The alpha version that I showed at MAX is much faster, taking just 3.06 seconds, which is more than 5 times faster. Well, Dave showed the results of our continued focus on performance and now it completes in just 1.25 seconds!