Adobe rolls out Flash Builder 4 and several other products

Mar 24, 2010 15:03 GMT  ·  By

Adobe has launched an upgrade for Flex Builder 3, and renamed the IDE as Flash Builder 4. At the same time, the Flash platform will provide an API for developers to integrate their projects with some of the major social networks on the web. Alongside Flash Builder, a new IDE has been rolled out for ColdFusion development with ColdFusion Builder and the open source project for the Flex framework has been upgraded to version 4.

The two Builder releases, Flash and ColdFusion, provide an Eclipse-based development platform for RIAs with more advanced features. While the rechristening of the Flex Builder version into Flash Builder was a bold and maybe inspired marketing move, it will not affect in any way how the platform behaves in dev environments.

The IDE will continue to faithfully serve Flex developers in building rich Internet applications on top of the open source Flex framework. One of the major enhancements introduced with the new version is a better integration, not only with the Adobe Creative Suite tools, but with a variety of data backends like Adobe LiveCycle, Java, PHP and ColdFusion.

The Flash Builder 4 tool can be acquired for $249 for the Standard version, while the Premium edition is priced at $699.

As a response for the ColdFusion community cry for a dedicated ColdFusion IDE, Adobe has also released ColdFusion Builder, a more specialized platform for building, testing and launching CF projects to replace Dreamweaver. The platform is heavily integrated with Flash Builder for fast RIA deployment and is priced by Adobe at $299.

Released to the open source community a while back, Flex has failed to take off as anticipated, but Adobe continues working on the framework introducing a new skinning and component architecture called Spark to build on top and eventually replace the ancient MX architecture.

Besides all this, nothing has gained more media attention than the launch of the Social Service for the Adobe Flash Platform, which will permit developers to easily call on an API to integrate their Flash projects with many social networks. For now, the Social Service provides support for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google, AOL and Yahoo, but the list is expected to expand pretty quickly.

The general Social Service API permits programmers to build social features that won't break whenever a social network makes changes, all of this being handled in the API's backend at Gigya and Adobe.

Adobe Flash Builder 4 is available for download here.

Adobe ColdFusion Builder is available for download here.

The Social Service Library is available for download here.