It was pretty good to see some of the new stuff coming in Flex 3 during the developer day this week at Adobe Live London. We were a tough audience and didn’t give much of a WOW feedback – sorry! Largely I think because much of the new stuff demonstrated I think we might have claimed a right to expect – such as re-factoring support and improved work-flow with the rest of CS3.
Not covered on the day, but would have got a WOW from me is ‘Framework caching’, described by Ted on Flex today.
To me this was not expected, however I tend to think it has been a long-time coming and is one of the most significant improvements within Flash Platform in a long time. I came to Flash very late (MX2004) and primarily worked with components. (I came to Flex even later – V2.) It always struck me as a little odd that Adobe/Macromedia placed such great emphasis on keeping the plugin download small which then had the knock-on of vast quatities of band-width wasted as the same component code is transmitted time after time and where you least desire it -hitting the load time of your SWF. However now being able to cache the framework now means only the code specific to the application need be transmitted. Much more net-friendly. I can’t wait!
