Adobe's New Tools Envision an Easier Development Cycle

by Judith Dinowitz, Master Editor-in-Chief

June 1, 2009 – Today Adobe announced a beta release of several new tools for Flash and Flex developers. These tools – Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder), Flash Catalyst and the open source Flex 4 framework – have been designed to simplify the application development cycle for Flash and Flex developers. You can download these tools on the Adobe labs site at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/.

About two weeks ago, Michael and I sat down with Tim Buntel, Senior Product Manager for Flex, and Dave Gruber, Group Product Marketing Manager for Flex, to discuss these tools and what they mean to the Flex and ColdFusion communities. Tim and Dave said that Adobe focused on three goals when building these new tools: to increase developer productivity, to allow easier integration with services and servers, such as ColdFusion and PHP, and to help developers create more expressive applications, by leveraging new features now available in the Flash Player 10.

The first change that most developers will notice is that the tool formerly known as Flex Builder has been renamed Flash Builder. Tim and Dave assured us that this was done purely to unify the brand name of their commercial Flash tools, and to make a clear differentiation between their commercial offerings and the free open-source Flex 4 framework, which underlies Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst.

Flash Builder 4

Adobe's enhancements to Flash Builder 4 include additions that most developers will welcome, such as unit testing capabilities, a new built-in network monitor and template support. The feature that really wowed us, however, was Flash Builder 4's new service introspection. Flash Builder can connect with and consume web services or server code, such as JSP or PHP code, an XML document, a RESTful service, or a BlazeDS or LCDS service. Once you point Flash Builder to the service, the tool will introspect the service and generate MXML code to consume it.

In Flex Builder 3, Tim said, developers found it a challenge to develop applications that used multiple backends; they would have to hand-code each service that the application consumed. He also noted the huge audience of developers in the scripting world, such as JSP and PHP developers, who want to be able to use their backend code in Flex applications and don't want to have to worry about coding result handlers. Flash Builder 4 makes this process much easier, and treats each service as its own black box.

Code generation capabilities for Java, PHP, LCDS, and BlazeDS are all built into Flash Builder 4.

Dave mentioned that the UI for creating services is extensible, making it possible to write your own service for Python, for instance.

The service has to be remote to do introspection, and for the Flash application to consume the service. Flash Builder ignores everything that is not remote. Once you define the services in the service view, you don't have to worry about them, and a simple click suffices to build out that part of your application.

Of course, Flex developers know that when dealing with server-side code, components may be strongly or weakly typed. Flash Builder takes care of that as well by providing a user interface (UI) that allows you to strongly type a weakly-typed component on the client side.

As Tim Buntel said, "We're automating parts of the coding that you don't really care about."

Michael asked whether they planned to package Flash Builder 4 with the upcoming Bolt IDE for ColdFusion developers. Tim said that they have not yet announced any packaging, but that there are specific workflows having to do with Bolt and Flash Catalyst.

Flash Catalyst

Flash Catalyst is a tool that brings a new designer-developer workflow to Flex development. The tool's audience is designers, or developers who do both the user interface and the development. However, the primary audience here is the designer, not the developer.

Flash Catalyst does not require coding; it produces code in the form of an FXP or Flex Project file, which can be opened and used in Flash Builder.

What makes Flash Catalyst different from other design tools, such as Adobe Illustrator, Fireworks, Photoshop, or Flash Professional? Flash Catalyst creates a visual design that adds a functional UI to what would normally be a static design. Behaviors, transitions and movements such as a mouseover, a button click, and a change of state, can all be programmed into the FXP file. Flash Catalyst supports the idea of specific pages having different states in the application. As all of this information is part of an FXP file, this dramatically decreases the development time for an application and prevents many of the problems designers have traditionally had communicating the intent and look of their design to developers.

When you import an FXP file into Flash Builder, all of these behaviors are saved and can be accessed by the developer. Creative Suite products can also open FXP files, and edit specific parts of the design as needed, but once the file is edited in a developer product such as Flash Builder, as the code is no longer generated, it can no longer be returned to Flash Catalyst.

Flex 4 Framework

Dave said that the Flex 4 Framework underlies both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst. To make this happen, Adobe had to add new graphic support to MXML to support state awareness. They also added new rich text capabilities to take advantage of some of the new features of Flash Player 10.

Adobe's Intention: To Make Your Lives Easier

In the end, Tim and Dave assured us that the new features in both Flash Builder and the introduction of Flash Catalyst to the Flash Platform will help designers and developers be more productive, do less grunt work code in Flash Builder and create more expressive applications. They're hoping you'll download these tools and try them out on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash. Go for it!

Judith Dinowitz is the Master Editor-in-Chief of the House of Fusion magazines and journals, where she enjoys serving up ColdFusion and Flex goodness on a weekly and quarterly basis.

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