The scoop on the next version of Adobe's Flex - 2.0.1

Ted Patrick, the Flex evangelist for Adobe, is doing a countdown over on his site of the days until Flex 2.0.1 is released. At part of Adobe's Mac World presence they are going to announce both Flex Builder for the Mac as well as a new version of Flex 2; 2.0.1. I predicted pretty big things for Flex in my 2007 guesses, and part of the reason was this new version. While the version number would indicate that this is a small update, the fact of the matter is that this release makes Flex 2 ready for the big time. The first release of Flex 2 provided a very solid framework and a lot of developers have built some incredible things (Fauxto and Pikeo come to mind). But with 2.0.1, Adobe waded through thousands of emails to fix over 350 subtle bugs in the framework and the builder. When combined with the fact that the builder is now going to be available for the Mac, we're talking about a development environment that has been fully tested and is ready for the big time.

But Adobe didn't stop at just bug fixes, which is why the 2.0.1 label perplexes me so much. They listened to feature requests and the new release has some that are going to make a lot of developers very happy.

• Faster Compiler - The new Flex 2 compiler is much faster which is going to mean a lot less downtime when building and testing Flex applications.
• Runtime CSS Support - This is probably my favorite feature. Originally, when you built a Flex application, you gave it one stylesheet and it skinned your application but you were pretty much stuck with that. But designers rightly complained how hard it was to change graphical elements and so Adobe added the ability to change the stylesheets on the fly. This is going to give developers and designers the ability to give users full control over the look of applications. In the same way MySpace allows you to add your own CSS, developers can give users the ability to upload CSS files and customize the experience.
• Module Support - This is huge. Module support allows developers to write mini-Flex applications that can be brought into the main Flex application as needed after its been compiled. So if most of your users are only using 20% of your application, they only need to load that 20% and your power users can still be catered to as they use other parts of the application by loading them on the fly. This means that Flex .SWFs are going to be much smaller and developers will have a lot of flexibility in how their application loads. This should cut down on load times and make flex applications much more responsive to user needs.
• Apollo Support - Not much information has been released about this, but Flex 2.0.1 is going to include some support for Apollo applications. It has been given some functionality that will make it easier to develop for Apollo. We should get more details closer to Apollo's release.
  

I'm not understating when I say that this is an extremely important release. The bug fixes combined with the new features go a long way towards shoring up any Flex 2 imperfections. Developers who have used the platform are going to be impressed with the new stability and those who are coming to it for the first time are going to be using a tested, bulletproof Rich Internet Application technology. This release sets the stage for Flex to continue it's marketshare growth and solidifies the Flex framework into something that enterprises and startups alike can put faith into.