Well no sooner do we have beta 1 of Flex 2.0 then along comes another. Check out Adobe Labs for the beta 2 release of Flex 2.0.
Eric Anderson has an article on the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) site about Flex 2.0 beta 2, but a few of the key points are below:
Adobe Flex 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK): The Flex SDK includes the Flex 2.0 compiler and Flex 2.0 framework. The SDK is available for free for building and deploying RIAs with Flex.
Adobe Flex Charting: Flex’s Charting components provide advanced charting capabilities including multi-axis charts and sophisticated financial charts along with line, bar, and pie charts.
Adobe Flex Builder 2.0: Flex Builder 2.0 is the Flex 2.0 IDE based on Eclipse that provides an enhanced development environment for building Flex 2.0 applications. Flex Builder delivers developer productivity capabilities like code hinting, code debugging, and a graphical Design view.
Adobe Flex Data Services 2.0: Flex Data Services (formerly Flex Enterprise Services 2.0) provides the same RPC services available in Flex 1.5 (RemoteObject, proxied Web Services, and HTTP) with new data messaging capabilities to enable pub/sub messaging, collaboration, and data push along with data management services to solve the unique performance, data synchronization, and data paging problems that data-rich rich Internet applications present.
If you want to see what’s changed between beta 1 and beta 2 have a read through the release notes. The one thing that did jump out at me (as I never really read these sort of things), was the fact that if you want to run Flex Builder 2.0 on a Windows system you’ll need 1GB of ram. (This covers off the Flex 2.0 SDK, the 2.0 charting components and the 8.5 player).
However if you want to go the lean and mean route and just use the commandline Flex 2.0 SDK you’ll only need 512MB (1GB recommended). Plus it allows Mac, Linux and Solaris to join the party too as development platforms (Now where are their IDEs :P).
I wonder if we are getting near the actual release system requirements here? I know that eclipse can be a bit of a resource hog and 1GB isn’t too much of an issue for me personally but imagine having to attempt to open it with all the other digital trappings of corporate life. Hopefully this will drop to about 512MB come release so take the specs with a pince of salt :)
For those of you who haven’t already got it you can download it here. If you haven’t already tried Flex 2.0 and the new Flex Builder 2.0 have a go – you may be surprised and actually enjoy using it :P
Hey man we got Eclipse on Mac and Linux!! and other better IDEs
Anyway memory is cheap, no one does serious Eclipse development without a gig even in corporate environments.
My problem is.. will this release work on my MacBookPro. The other release of Flash player 8.5 joes crashes on my MBP, must be a Mac Intel problem but i can’t find anything saying it doesnt work on Mac Intel. I’ll try this version tonight.
Yeah I know that eclipse runs on Mac OSX etc, but the Flex 2.0 installer only works correctly for Windows :(. Otherwise you need to do a hack job on the plugins etc…
As for the player issue – I know they released an update to the 8.0 player for MacTel, but I’m not sure how stable the 8.5 player will be. I suspect that this will be the last public beta before they officially announce Flex 2.0, (I suspect around mid April would make sense).
No it totally crashes with MacTel…. guess im going to half to wait to do some flex development