Flex Roadmap Session
POSTED IN Adobe Max, Air, Conferences, Flash Builder, Flash Platform, Flex, News | TAGS : compiler, Deepa Subramaniam, Flex, hero, improvements, lab49, mobile, performance, rsl, sdk, Spark, threading October 25, 2010
Here at another session with Deepa Subramariam, the product manager for Flex, where she will talk of things they are thinking about and hopefully will carry out in future Flex builds. They are really looking for feedback, so please comment on what’s being said and make yourself heard.
Deepa started the conversation straight away with mentioning that Flex 4.5 (hero) preview was released to the public yesterday night. Go ahead and download/try it now!
In an overview of her presentation, she placed a lot of emphasis on the performance of this new build. This is real good since one of my earlier post mentioned that Flex 4′s performance decreased by about 3 times less than Flex 3. Everyone from now on will be built around performance in mind (she even repeated it 3 times, a la Ballmer).
The new SDK will include both desktop and mobile components in one, and will include touchscreen functionality automatically. It will all be built it and will know which one to target when compiling. This is a real good idea since it increases code reuse without really thinking about it.
She goes on to mention that the Datagrid is also a very big part of the new SDK, but she won’t go too much into it since there’s a talk just about the Datagrid (which I will be attending). But as a quick reminded, performance and a lot of extra features are being added since this will replace both the MX Datagrid and AdvandedDatagrid.
Another feature is the improvement of the RSLs. Essentially, RSLs are no longer just one massive swz, but it will be separated in several smaller swz and your application will only load the RSLs it needs. The RSLs will also be cached so that you don’t have to reload your RSL over and over. This will greatly reduce startup time and load time of your application. Awesome.
Deepa also mentioned that the compiler is also being revamped. The incremental compilation time and memory usage will be reduced by 20%. Good news for people who are big on compiling often.
Another big part of Flex is that Adobe is now changing the development process of the product. They are now going to do a 6 month release calendar for Flex. They are also releasing test units for the Flex code and will let the users submit patches for the SDK after they pass these tests and then be reviewed by the development team. This is great news since now expert Flex developers can send things that they can fix and Adobe will include it in a later build. Great use of the community on this.
She goes on to talk about ‘Enterprise Enablement’. These are enterprise solutions that can be very useful for large application, like a better printing and accessibility support, better internationalization that does automatic language detection and better component extensibility across all components to make it easier to change and reuse the SDK code.
She finishes with saying that they are concentrating hard on speed. Improving not just the components, but the core itself, like the language (which could definitely use a revamp), RPC (including the network layer and full REST) and native Flash Player features that can be leveraged in Flex.
Now introducing Falcon, a brand new compiler made for Flex from scratch to fix a lot of problems that are now there. It also has deep integration with Flash Builder which will make it a lot more like a Java style of coding (live problem displaying, analytic, etc). This is the first talk of it in public and hoping to share this amazingness with us within a year. This will definitely change the landscape of the development cycle and hopefully entice more developers to use Flex.
The next announcement is huge. Adobe is working on Flash Player to include threading, but make it simple enough for people to use without thinking too much about locks. They will offload work to a thread (serialization, calculations, etc) and keep the UI running smooth as silk. It’s about damn time! I’m extremely ecstatic at this announcement since this will be a new era for Flex development. I actually did mention of threading being a problem with Flex in a earlier post (which an Adobe employee mentioned that it actually went around the office when I wrote it). Wow, just wow. Exciting time to be a Flex developer.
That’s all for now folks. There’s a ‘meet the team’ tonight that will listen in on our feedback. If there’s anything you want me to ask, just comment on this post.
3 COMMENTS
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About damn time to hear about threading in Flash, but it better not be just for Flex/AIR and be in the native Flash runtime.
It will be. It has to be since you can’t have threading in AS3 unless you mean chunking. This has to be done at the lowest level (ie. the player). Definitely some exciting times ahead
Didn’t get a chance to sit in this session but it does sound pretty exciting. I did sit in the mobile development session and Flash Builder now provides a complete UI experience around building, compiling, debugging and deploying android apps (and in the future other mobile). As you mentioned performance is one of the things they are working on as itemrenderers are taxing on mobile but they did write a new mobileitemrenderer to improve performance. In discussion with the team some of these performance issues can be worked around by writing your own AS components.
Threading sounds awesome. Very excited about working with this stuff.