Macromedia Unveils Flex Update

Macromedia on Monday announced it would upgrade its Flex development system and server next month with performance improvements and additional tools for adding data display and visualization.

Flex 1.5, which will ship in November, is the newest version of Macromedia's platform for creating rich client applications that can be run within the San Francisco-based vendor's popular Flash client inside Web browsers.

"Flex 1.5 will significantly accelerate customer success in building rich Internet applications," promised David Mendels, the company's general manager, in a statement.

New runtime libraries and faster application startup times can boost performance of Flex-written and -delivered apps by as much as 50 percent, said Macromedia, while enhanced tools let developers add animated and interactive charts and graphs to their products.

Flex 1.5 will also sport a set of pre-set "styles" so developers without advanced Flash programming skills can quickly change the look and feel of applications.Early users of Flex 1.5 touted its faster performance and greater flexibility. "The new charting and customization features in Macromedia Flex 1.5 enabled us to build a dashboard that delivers intuitive, interactive reports to our clients, displaying when, how, and where their mobile-device applications are being used," said Drew Sievers, the chief executive officer of mFoundry. "We couldn't have done it without Flex 1.5."