| At the beginning of the decade Macromedia coined the term rich Internet application (RIA) to describe the future of applications. An RIA is a Web experience that’s engaging, interactive, lightweight, and flexible. RIAs offer the flexibility and ease of use of an intelligent desktop application and add the broad reach of traditional Web applications. Adobe Flex 2 has established itself as the premiere platform for delivering these experiences.
The Flash Player is an ideal runtime for a rich Internet application. Installed on 98% of Web-enabled desktops, the Player has a reach far beyond any individual Web browser or other client technology. For years, developers took advantage of this by using the Macromedia Flash tool to build compelling, data-driven applications. But the Flash programming model wasn’t for everyone. When building what would become Flex 1.0, we geared the programming model towards developers who had more of a programming background, especially Java Web application developers. We designed a tag-based language called MXML and influenced the evolution of ActionScript 2.0 to appeal to developers used to object-oriented programming. Flex 1.0 and Flex 1.5 were very successful for Macromedia, reaching hundreds of customers in 18 months, impressive for a v1 product with an enterprise price tag.
But we realized that to reach our goal of a million Flex developers we needed to make some drastic changes in the platform. Our first change was to rewrite the virtual machine in the Flash Player from scratch and improve the language at the same time. The AVM2 inside Flash Player 9 is orders of magnitude faster than the previous virtual machine and uses less memory. The ActionScript 3.0 language is now on a par with other enterprise development languages like Java and C#. We then re-architected the Flex Framework to take advantage of the improvements our underlying foundation exposed. |
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Pro Jakarta Tomcat 5Ideal for Tomcat administrators and those who wish to configure Tomcat, this succinct text describes configuration files, as well as administration features like security, auto-deployment, remote deployment, and datasources.
Java was initially released in the mid-1990s as a way to liven up static Web... | | HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide)Like previous editions, HTML 4 for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide has won universal praise for being the most succinct, indispensable guide to using HTML to design Web pages. Completely updated for HTML 4, this third edition covers such important innovations as Cascading Style Sheets and dynamic HTML, as well as the improved... | | |
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