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.

I know a few people have already blogged this, especially Mr. _Eat-Sleep-and-Breathe Flex_ Jesse Warden, but I wanted to street that you can download now a Flex Ajax Bridge from Adobe Labs. This bridge define a new simple API extends the functionality of the ExternalInterface class allowing seamless integration between Flex and the different HTTP Remote Request methods, hence, ActiveX for IE and XMLHTTPRequest for all others.

You can view a sample application using this bridge here. Note that you need Flash 8.5 Beta to view this app.

Laszlo up to this point was always compared to Adobe Flex, but OpenLaszlo just made a huge announcement: Their system will now be able to generate AJAX / DHTML pages too. IBM just released their contribution to Open Ajax, but this could be one hell of an IDE and a nice step forward in the Ajax path.

Laszlo Systems is expected to announce this week that it will modify its Web development toolset to let applications run alone in browsers without the Flash presentation system. The company plans to show a preview of the tool at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference this week.

The company's OpenLaszlo development tool is designed for writing Web applications with a rich, interactive user interface, often referred to as AJAX-style applications. The present version of the tool relies on Adobe's Flash to run OpenLaszlo applications. But by the end of this year, the company will have a "Dynamic HTML" option for OpenLaszlo, according to company executives. That means applications would run in a modern Web browser--including on mobile devices--without the Flash plug-in.

"With Flex 2.0 and Flash Player 8.5, we can finally deliver the kinds of rich applications our clients demand without compromise. That's Web 2.0! With these words, a VP at Cynergy Systems today gave his ringing endorsement of the Adobe Flex 2.0 product line and Adobe Flash Player 8.5"

• Flash Player 8.5 -- the latest high-performance client runtime for engaging Web experiences
• Flex Framework 2.0 -- the core programming model and component library for Flex
• Flex Builder 2.0 -- an Eclipse-based IDE for developing rich Internet applications with the Flex Framework
• Flex Enterprise Services 2.0 -- essential data services and an open adapter architecture for delivering data-intensive rich Internet applications and deeply integrating with enterprise service-oriented infrastructure
• Flex Charting Components 2.0 -- extensible components for advanced data visualization

How can find a list of changes at the official site, but Jesse Warden elaborated on a very detailed post. Among others, Flex 2.0 includes a beta version of Mystic, which is the next ColdFusion release with better Flex integration.

Yes, that's right! The moment everyone, well, some of you, well, at least me, have been waiting for. Flex 2.0 beta is out! Make sure you uninstall the Alpha version first and then re-create every single project before using it.

The buzzwords du jour are AJAX, RIA, Web 2.0 ... Both Adobe and Microsoft are involved and trying their best to get market share. Abode has Flash and Flex; and AJAX is compatible with every programming language and plays really well with CF (through ajaxCFC :) ).

Microsoft has been working on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), previously called Avalon. This presentation layer takes an xml based declarative language called XAML (pronounced zammel), that stands for eXtensible Application Markup Language.

I knew about XAML, but the interesting part is that Microsoft went big! They are also releasing a full development application set called expression. The community technology preview just came out and it looks like a take on Abobe's Creative Suite.

I suspect what unlike XUL (pronounced zul), which is Mozilla's xml declarative language, XAML will penetrate the market thanks to Microsoft's big name. It should natively work with the .NET framework and we should soon also see a version for Mac, even though Microsoft will no longer support their IE for Macs.

If you are a new developer and want to be ahead of the game, keep an eye on Flex 2.0 and XAML. There are other technologies such as laslo, xul, ror, bindows, backspace, and dojo, that should not be overlooked either.

1. RIA (Rich Internet Applications) growth: We will start seeing more and more sites using AJAX, XAML, and Flex 2.0. With the release of XAML and Windows Vista, .NET Ajax sites will start becoming more popular. Adobe's (formally Macromedia) Flex 2.0 builder will allow non-flash savvy programmers to build full Flash RIA’s using nothing but declarative XML syntax. XUL will slowly fade away. RoR will attract php programmers, but will not find its way to the Java, .Net, or CF community.

2. AJAX Platforms IDE’s will arise, making building user interface components with back-end integration through AJAX achievable without having to program with core frameworks. This new software will do for AJAX exactly what Flex 2.0 is doing for flash: allowing visual authoring capabilities by using new IDE’s, or by building plug-ins for existing IDE’s such as Eclipse.

3. With quick growth of SOA, Web Services, and Remote Calls, data security will start becoming an issue. A greater effort will be devoted towards encryption, authentication, and authorization.

4. Blogging will continue to rise, but as it does, a new, smarter filtering mechanism will have to be developed. Corporate IQ cannot depend strictly on tagging and aggregators. Probability based algorithms will analyze the personal relevance of every post.

5. Mobile applications will start getting popular. AJAX for mobiles and Flash Lite will start hiring to build full mobile RIA’s.

6. Some 25-year-old kid will become millionaire after coming up with a way for search engines to RELIABLY index AJAX and Flash applications.

7. By the end of the year, Wi-Max will start becoming available in mayor cities, threatening ISP’s and cellular phone providers. VoIP wireless devices will slowly replace cell phones, providing more reliable, less expensive, and more sophisticated capabilities. Blackberries will loose market share.

8. VoIP, IMS, SIP, XMPP, and SOA will continue to grow. Web 2.0 and VoIP 2.0 will merge. Unified messaging will get more popular among corporations.

9. People will continue paying premium for self-service and software applications will loose market share to shared services.

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!

So Yahoo released today their version of RIA maps, but unlike google using AJAX, they are using Flex.

Check it out here: http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/

It’s coming out great. I really like the option to toggle live traffic alerts, I was waiting for this for a really long time.