Adobe Systems on Monday announced the general availability of three development tools and a new service that helps Flash coders link to social networks. The new products include Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion Builder, Flex 4 Framework, and the Social Flash Platform Service.
“Companies are under extraordinary pressure to keep their competitive edge," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Adobe Platform Business Unit. “The Flash Platform helps companies deploy business-critical applications to a wide audience, while ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder truly accelerate the development process. We look forward to seeing what our talented developer community creates with these latest additions in our developer ecosystem."
Previous versions of Flash Builder went by the name Flex, but this was changed because many developers use it for coding in ActionScript, the language used to program Flash, without making use of the Flex framework. The name “Flex" is now relegated to the code framework, which is also launching as an open-source version today. Builder is an Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment), and the new version is designed to increase productivity with intelligent coding tools, a network monitor, an improved debugger, ASDoc support, and command-line build capability. The Flash development tool includes support for Web coding standards such as Java, PHP, ColdFusion, REST, and SOAP. It will integrate with Adobe's yet-to-be-released Catalyst design tool.
