I finally managed to get myself to London again for the Ben Forta presents on Flex 2 for ColdFusion Developers presentation, and as usual it answered lots of questions and I think amazed quite a few people. The PowerPoint slides should be available soon on the UKCFUG site, and the code demo'd is available at http://labs.macromedia.com/. So what came out of it:
Beta 2 is coming any day - it was actually out on the day of the presentation!
The pricing has been a major factor in this release, after all the posts and messages last time Adobe have focused on price. To prove this you can actually develop Flex apps for Free by creating the MXML in an editor of you choice and compile it using the freely available Flex Framework and SDK
Support for Mac is coming, though there is no official news on Mac-Intel
Flex apps 2 are 100's of time faster on the initial load then Flex 1. If anyone who saw the Pre Flex 1 presentations, or experimented with it will remember how slow a simple hello world app would take to start.
Flash 8.5 was actually rewritten to improve speed and is not compatiable with previous version, but to ensure backward compatibility has the pre 8.5 engine available within it
There will be a new Flash Lite to use with Flex 2, so you will be able to push these apps to Mobile devices
That was just the general spill, below is whats new in Flex 2 and/or beta 2
CFC CRUD, Bean wizards. Seeing this in action was pretty amazing. - This actually is available as a seperate download so you can use it in conjunction with CFeclipse. Look for the ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0
RDS - Shown last night it was a nice feature to have available agin. This is also available to use when you download the ColdFusion Extensions
ActionScript to CFC and CFC to ActionScript wizards availabe by right-clicking on the appropiate file. Again available via the CF extention
Charting Components are now included in the beta 2 of Flex, which might mean that selling it as a seperate package might be out of the window.
Live Charting - Charts feeding directly from data
There was some more covered but my notes at that point get scarce. Needless to say I think there will be a few downloading Flex 2 today after the meeting, but even if you don't want to go near Flex make sure you download the ColdFusion Extensions for RDS support and CFC wizards.The one point Ben made a few times was that if you want it in the application/server let Adobe know. Without letting them know there is a demand they won't include it.By the way the sample app used was Phone Selector.