Adobe Retools Flash Builder and Flex for Mobile Application Development

Apr 11, 2011

by Judith Dinowitz, Master Editor-in-Chief, House of Fusion

Today Adobe announced the upcoming release of Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5. They also announced the upcoming release of Photoshop Creative Suite 5.5, which will be covered in a separate article. The story behind this news is that Adobe has focused on making these releases even more mobile-centric, updating their products for deployment to mobile devices.

Fusion Authority spoke to Adam Lehman, Senior Product Manager, Flash Builder for a closer look at what this means for Flex developers.

Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5

Lehman explained that with mobile devices becoming more prevalent, developers have to create applications and then tailor them to each specific device, often with different operating systems and in different languages. Lehman said that Flex and AIR are the answer to this inefficient development cycle, and that Adobe's slogan is "one tool, one language, one codebase". With Flex 4.5's updated mobile features, Flex developers can create their applications once, test them for different devices and deploy natively. Flex developers can reuse the majority of Flex code for business platform logic, and tweak the user interface as needed for mobile development.

Lehman showed us a sample stock ticker application that can be used on Apple IOS or on Android. He used Flash Builder 4.5's emulator to test the application, and then tested it on his phone remotely. What impressed me was the speed of the stock ticker application on both an Ipad 1 and a Nexus One Android phone. Lehman was able to view a grid of stock information, select a specific stock, then see a line graph of that stock’s activity and manipulate the graph by touch, and all fairly quickly. Lehman stressed that a Nexus One is one of the slower devices out on the market.

Testing and Debugging Flex Code Directly

The code used in the mobile application did not seem too different from Flex code I've seen before (see Figure 1 below). When testing the code directly on the device, at a break point, Flash Builder went immediately into debug mode, showing where the code was stopped and all environmental variables. The developer can continue running the application if he hits resume in Flash Builder, and it will continue until the next break point. Ironically, this feature did not work when Lehman was showing it off.

Figure 1: The Debug Mode opened up in Flash Builder when the application was at a break point.

Lehman said that Adobe fine-tuned the stock application specifically for the native IOS file. On the Apple IOS, there is no back button, so they added a back button into the design. They also took advantage of the wider screen real estate for the iPad and added a graph on the right, next to the stock quotes.

Some of Flex’s New Features

When creating a new project in Flash Builder, one now has the option to choose a mobile web project, which is written in AIR. Flash Builder supports projects for Apple IOS, Blackberry IOS or Android. There are three different templates for mobile projects:

a blank template, easy for the designer to customize
a view-based template, meant for Android applications, tied to the menu buttons
a tabbed-based template, meant for the iPhone, where everything is based on touch

Adobe has added new mobile-specific components for application navigation and state management and retro-fitted existing Spark components for mobile development. They’ve also tweaked the user interface, paying particular attention to the screen space one would find on a mobile device. In addition, developers can customize components through skinning and styling.

Beyond the improvements they’ve made to Flex in syntax and capability, Adobe has also focused on improving the performance of mobile applications. In Flex 4.5, they measured a 65 percent increase in performance for large scale projects in profiling and refactoring operations. There is also new interoperability with Flash Catalyst Creative Suite 5.5, with a bi-directional project and library workflow between the two programs. You can take your files from Flash Builder to Flash Catalyst and back again. This should help with productivity and a faster development cycle.

Developers have an option to compile a project to a native format: An Apple API file or an Android APK file. Once a file is packaged natively, there is no way to distinguish between an application that was developed in Flash and an application that was developed in another language. The AIR runtime must be included in the native file for Apple IOS applications, while we assume that AIR has already been installed on the Android device. (If AIR is not installed, the user will be prompted to download it.)

New Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

In a partnership with Zend, Adobe has developed a new version of Flash Builder 4.5 specifically for PHP developers. Zend and Adobe are packaging Zend Studio 8 with Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP and selling them together. This package includes comprehensive JavaScript and PHP debugging, PHP unit-testing and profiling, and PHP class introspection from Flash Builder. Both Flash Builder and Zend Studio are built upon the Eclipse platform, which brings all the standard Eclipse advantages to the table as well.

Availability of Flex and Flash Builder

Flex 4.5 SDK is immediately available to developers. Within 30 days, in early May, Adobe will be releasing Flash Builder 4.5 and other Creative Suite 5.5 products. (Didn't you hear? Flash Builder Premium 4.5 is now part of Creative Suite 5.5 Web Premium.) Flash Builder will immediately support Android development, but Blackberry and IOS development support will be added in June.

The pricing is as follows: Flash Builder Standard, which includes ColdFusion Builder 2, is $299 ($99 to upgrade from Flash Builder 3 and $49 to upgrade from Flash Builder 4). Flash Builder Premium is $699. Flash Builder for PHP Standard is $399 and Flash Builder for PHP Premium is $799.

Further Information

Flash Builder 4.5

Creative Suite 5.5

Flash Builder Burrito on Adobe Labs

Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 Accelerate Mobile App Development (Flash Platform Blogs)

iPhone Developer can Now Accelerate iOS App Development with Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5

Adobe and Zend Introduce Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

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.