Congratulations to both the Flex team and AIR team for their hard work over the past few years. Flex has undergone many personalities over the past 5 years, reinventing itself along the way. Those of you who remember Royale and Flex 1 know that although we all say its potential Flex was less than easy to use. Flex 1.5 was a major improvement however Flex 2 was the real leap in this products life. Flex 2 gave us a new language in AS3 as well as vastly improved tools with the Eclipse based IDE.

Flex 3 is a milestone in the maturity of the Flex product. It has made vast improvements in simplifying common tasks, added new features, and greatly improved the Flex Builder IDE. A few of the new features of Flex 3 Framework include a new advanced datagrid, improved styling and skinning with greater integration with the Adobe CS3 product line, and runtime localization of display language. Flex Builder 3 adds tools like refactoring, improved design view, and WSDL introspection. For more information on the new features of the Flex 3 product line visit the new features chart here.

Along with Flex 3 comes the initial release of AIR. It is amazing to think that a product I have been using and blogging about for well over a year is finally becoming an actual public final release. AIR will blur the boundaries of the on line/off line worlds as its capabilities allow for companies to offer a desktop presence that can easily communicate with an Internet server when a connection is available and work in an off line mode when a connection fails to exist. Local data storage is one of the many AIR specific APIs. AIR is attractive to many different types of developers as the language choices for AIR include Flex, HTML/AJAX, and Flash. To learn more about AIR visit the Adobe AIR product page.

Read more from Rich Tretola.