Macromedia announced the latest version of its web development tool set – Studio 8 – recently. The product is expected to be available near the end of September in Mumbai, but Macromedia kept a preview conference on 2nd September in the city.
Vaishali, our creative director and lead RIA developer, went in to check things out. The event was well organized. The ingredients were a superb venue (J W Marriot near Juhu beach), good food, and ultra fast presentations by the top brass of product teams from Macromedia.
The product itself has an impressive array of features. Flash 8 is touted as one of the biggest overhaul after Flash 4. The expressiveness effects have been introduced, and I guess that feature might have popped in after Adobe acquired Macromedia. There are numerous enhancements in the video and mobile side. That shows the path Flash may take in the future – especially with the broadband and mobile markets booming.
Unfortunately, there are not many improvements for a RIA developer. Rich Internet Applications using Flash is one of our core focus areas and we were looking forward to see improved components and additional component sets to be part of this release. That’s not in there. The Flash Remoting classes are also not yet revamped. I am feeling Macromedia, now Adobe, will push Flex more for the rich internet application development. There are a lot of third party components available too, and for the day, they remain a good bet.
“there are not many improvements for a RIA developer.”
I think that’s a fair assessment — the visual authoring tool is oriented towards visual design. But if your own focus is more towards standardized applications, then have you checked in on some of the other work underway these days…?
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/08/will_zorn_requi.cfm
(The new visual features in the Player have required a year or two of work…! 🙂
jd/mm
Hi from Macromedia,
I can’t find your email address. I’d be interested in getting your feedback on some things we are working on for RIA development.
Regards,
David
Macromedia
Hello John,
Flash 8 – definitely a great tool. It has made the life of a flash designer very easy. But as Nirav correctly mentioned not much in for a RIA developer.
Any upgrade on the components with new Flash 8 version? Would love if you guys have chipped in a charting component as well 🙂 Another point that comes to my mind is indexing the flash dynamic content. That would be one GREAT feature to add to Flash.
I read Mike’s blog where he talks about “Zorn”. Look forward to working on that. And what I am excited about is that you can code and deploy RIA applications without requiring to buy Flex server.
However I am not clear about what are the enterprise level features that Flex will have. May be clustering etc – but need to wait to see that. It will be important to learn what level and kind of complicated applications would one be able to make using Flex server that Zorn would not be able to.
:Vaishali.