In addition, Adobe added a new Social service to the recently introduced Adobe Flash Platform Services. The Social service streamlines integration between web applications and 14 leading social networks using Facebook Connect, Sign-in with Twitter, MySpaceID and LinkedIn.
Flash Builder 4 (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) is a professional grade Eclipse based development tool for rapidly building multi-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs) and content using the open source Flex framework. Developers can build more intuitive web applications that enable customers, partners, and employees to better understand and use data, leading to increased levels of productivity, satisfaction and effectiveness.
Flash Builder 4 accelerates development and testing of RIAs and content, providing new and improved coding and testing capabilities, while allowing designers and developers to more efficiently collaborate using new integrated workflows with Adobe Creative Suite.
Flash Builder 4 enables enhanced integration with a variety of data back ends (including PHP, ColdFusion, Java and Adobe LiveCycle) and easy introspection and consumption of REST and SOAP based services.
The updated open source Flex 4 framework, also now available, includes a new component architecture for RIAs providing complete separation of appearance and functionality, enabling each to be changed independently without affecting the other.
The new skinning and component architecture, code named Spark, builds on top of the existing MX architecture, providing a much more efficient mechanism for developers and designers to work together to control the appearance of their Flex applications.
In collaboration with Gigya, the new Adobe Flash Platform Services Social service enables developers to rapidly integrate applications created with Flash Builder and Adobe Flash Professional with social networks.
Developers no longer need to do the work of integrating with each separate, constantly changing social network service API to provide users access to multi networks. A single Flash Platform Services layer does the heavy lifting across multiple social networks. Additionally, the Social service will monitor each social network site to ensure changes to APIs do not break applications.
Today’s availability of Flash Builder 4 comes in advance of the much anticipated release of Flash Player 10.1, expected in the first half of 2010.
Currently available in beta, Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2 software enable designers and developers to use the same code, assets, frameworks, tools and services to create the most expressive applications, content and video for the browser and the desktop today, as well as mobile platforms in the future.
ColdFusion Builder is a new Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for rapidly and efficiently building ColdFusion applications and is integrated with Flash Builder 4 for fast, easy RIA development.
ColdFusion Builder provides a unified, customisable and extensible development environment to code applications, manage servers and deploy projects.
For detailed information on the new features and to download, please
David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Adobe Platform Business Unit, said: “Companies are under extraordinary pressure to keep their competitive edge. The Flash Platform helps companies deploy business-critical applications to a wide audience, while ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder truly accelerate the development process. We look forward to seeing what our talented developer community creates with these latest additions in our developer ecosystem.”
While Chris Griffith, staff engineer, Qualcomm, commented: “Adobe Flash Builder 4 and the Flex framework have become invaluable in Qualcomm's user experience efforts. With the release of Flash Builder 4, it has enabled us to build projects – from mobile to Web to the desktop – faster and in a cleaner, more concise fashion. As a result, our team can now explore new ideas without the previous overhead of recoding user interface elements."