Flash Player 9

Abode announced yesterday that Flash Player 8.5 Beta, very well known by Flex Developers and Beta testers, will be the official Flash 9.0. The features of this release include the ECMAScript Edition 4-based ActionScript 3.0 language and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which dramatically exceeds the performance of previous players.

The performance gains are massive... i.e. in a particular example, loading a large dataset in a flash grid took 20 seconds in Flash 7, 15 seconds in Flash 8, and less than 5 seconds in Flash 8.5, or 9 ...

The new authoring tool, code named Blaze, is still no where near the door... but it is expected the Flex 2.0 builder gets its final release by the end of the first half of the year... thus you should expect it sometime in June.