Adobe Releases Second Flex 2 Beta

mikepotter writes "Adobe released the second beta of Flex 2 yesterday. As well, they announced a coding contest, where 6 people will win a Plasma TV and an XBox 360. Developers can also use the Flex / AJAX bridge to build applications using both Flash and AJAX technologies that can interact with each other, similar to what Google Finance does."

Re:Adobe, please buy out Macromedia!!!!

[daranz]

Didn't they already buy out Macromedia? Seems like that was what started their efforts to get into web development software.

Re:Adobe, please buy out Macromedia!!!!

[DavidLeblond]

Is it cold underneath that rock? You should come out in the sun more often.

How about that ugly design?!

[SlappyBastard]

I'm curious how many other people put Flex and Flash together in their minds against the anti-design articles that have been running lately.

Hmmm . . . Drudge Report and Craigslist . . . Flash websites.

Just a loose thought that fell out of my head.

Working For Beer

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

As well, they announced a coding contest, where 6 people will win a Plasma TV and an XBox 360.

I can't help but think that these types of coding contests are just trolls for ideas that would have cost the companies a lot more had they hired a developer to sit around thinking this stuff up, and it seems a bit disingenuous. If they actually had to pay a developer rather than just giving away a few relatively cheap toys, it would cost considerably more. And if any of these ideas they are getting on the cheap a

Re:Working For Beer

[bedroll]

Yeah, but sometimes it makes a good project for a student who wouldn't have been paid anyway. Then they get a grade, get to say they won the contest on their resume, and get some free stuff. I bet if they really were giving beer as pay that college students would be all over this.

Question

[Rac3r5]

Its nice to have some rapid development tool, but is Flex efficient to use? Is it completly flash based?

Just asking.

Re:Question

[iamdaflash]

It will still compile to a flash swf file but the IDE is eclipse based, it's pretty cool the display is all set up in xml and you can switch between source/display view. Also actionscript 3 is going to be alot faster, can't wait to see what people are going to make with it.

The OSS Alternative

[curunir]

Open Laszlo [openlaszlo.org] is also a nice product. It still mostly requires flash on the client-side (they have an alpha-ish support for rendering in DHTML), but the server-side is licensed under the CPL (a.k.a. what Eclipse uses).

Re:The OSS Alternative

[Rac3r5]

very interesting product.. I'll check it out when I get home..