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The next-gen Flash development tools are here!

Posted: 02/06/09

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So finally Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst have arrived on Adobe Labs. This is quite possibly the biggest development to come out of Adobe since they released Flex 2 and Flash Player 9 in 2006.

First, you'll notice Flex Builder has gone; the decision was made to rebrand it to Flash Builder. Regardless of what you think about the naming of the product, its feature set is far more important. In my blog post in January 2009, I discussed 10 big features that I was pleased to see in the preview. This feature-set alone will significantly improve my development team's workflow beyond what was achieved with Flex Builder 3; provided a new Flash Player release is forthcoming shortly to address this issue I see no reason why we wouldn't migrate to Flash Builder 4 early in 2010.

Further, Adobe has given us a brand-new tool that looks set to change the way Flex developers and Interaction Design teams work together.

Traditionally, a design team would throw a load of flat images at a development team, and expect them to fill in the blanks. This usually ended in a lot of rows towards the end of the project, about things not looking how people had hoped.

If you were lucky, the design team would create a series of Flash prototypes that helped to convey not only the appearance, but the behaviour of the design. This still left the Flex developer will a massive amount of translation work to do, and we all know that corners get cut...

Flash Catalyst starts the project on the designer's desktop for design, and then moves on to the Flex developer for the 'wiring-up'. What allows this is FXG; a declarative graphics mark-up language for the Flex framework. Designs that start life as Illustrator or Photoshop documents can be incorporated directly into an FXP Flex project file, which can then be manipulated in the highly visual Flash Catalyst environment, before being imported into Flash Builder 4 for integration with business logic.

It's all still in beta, we've all now got to (a) go away and work out how each new tool works (b) how these new tools work together, and the existing tools we have and then (c) how we incorporate these to add benefit to our project life-cycle.

Looks like it'll be another 6-12 months of head-scratching and blogging!

Flash Builder 4 on Adobe Labs

Keywords for this post: flash, flash builder, catalyst, adobe, flex, FXG, FXP