MACROMEDIA ANNOUNCES FLEX 2 PRODUCT LINE AND FLASH PLAYER 8.5
New Eclipse-based tool to enable millions of application developers to build engaging and effective rich Internet applications with the Flash Platform
San Francisco, CA - October 6, 2005 - Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced the Macromedia Flex 2 product line and Macromedia Flash Player 8.5, the foundation for building effective rich Internet applications that blend the responsiveness of desktop software, the cross-platform reach of the web, and the breathtaking expressiveness of the Macromedia Flash Platform.
The new products are designed to span the full spectrum of rich Internet application scenarios, from e-commerce product configuration to visual trading applications that integrate with real-time data. Today’s announcement covers several major elements of the Flash Platform:
- Flash Player 8.5—the latest high-performance client runtime for rich Internet applications
- Flex Framework 2—the core programming model and component library for Flex
- Flex Builder 2—an all new Eclipse-based environment for developing rich Internet applications with the Flex Framework. Flex Builder 2, previously code-named Zorn, can incorporate rich media content from the recently released Macromedia Flash Professional 8, the leading authoring tool for creating rich interactive content.
- Flex Enterprise Services 2—essential data services, automated testing support, and an open adapter architecture for delivering data-intensive rich Internet applications and deeply integrating with enterprise service-oriented infrastructure
- Flex Charting Components 2—extensible components for advanced data visualization
"It is great to see the growing interest in rich Internet applications as organizations look for new ways to streamline customer engagement and internal processes," said David Mendels, general manager, Macromedia. "The Macromedia Flex 2 product line and Macromedia Flash Player 8.5 will enable millions of developers in organizations large and small to deliver cross-platform applications that will change the face of the Internet by bringing information to life."
Flash Player 8.5 adds industrial-strength programming power on top of the expressiveness introduced in Flash Player 8, creating a state-of-the-art, cross-platform runtime. It includes a new virtual machine that offers faster runtime performance, full runtime error reporting, improved debugging, and ActionScript 3. ActionScript 3 complies with the latest ECMAScript specifications, and increases developer productivity by making it easier to find and fix errors earlier. Flash Player is currently installed on over 600 million desktops and mobile devices globally, and new versions reach 80 percent of computers on the web in approximately 12 months.
Macromedia is also introducing a new tiered licensing model to bring the power of Flex development within reach of every professional application developer, while also offering value-added capabilities that scale to meet the needs of the most sophisticated enterprise projects. Flex Builder 2 will be sold for less than $1000 per developer and will include the ability to develop, compile, and deploy Flex applications that connect to XML and SOAP web services with no additional charges or server licensing required. Flex Enterprise Services 2 will be licensed on a per CPU, per project, and enterprise license basis to offer the development efficiency, performance, advanced integration capabilities, and testing support that advanced applications will require.
"Applications deployed by enterprises must increasingly meet divergent requirements across business-to-business and business-to-consumer scenarios, and must offer a rich user experience on the front end, while implementing, on the back end, a secure, maintainable connection to enterprise data and services," said Ray Valdes, analyst, Gartner. "Rich Internet application platforms based on mainstream IDEs that support connecting to enterprise services using service-oriented architectures can provide a good return on investment through enhanced agility, improved usability, and increased end-user productivity."
Alpha versions of Flex Builder 2 and Flash Player 8.5 are expected to be available for download on October 17 in conjunction with the MAX 2005 developer conference. The alpha version of Flex Enterprise Services 2 will be available later in the development cycle. All of these products are expected to be commercially available in the first half of calendar 2006. For more information, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex2intro. To sign up to be notified when the public alpha of Flex 2 is available for download, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex2notify.
ABOUT MACROMEDIA
Experience matters. Macromedia is motivated by the belief that great experiences build great businesses. Our software empowers millions of business users, developers, and designers to create and deliver effective, compelling, and memorable experiences — on the Internet, on fixed media, on wireless, and on digital devices.
PRAISE FOR THE MACROMEDIA FLEX 2 PRODUCT LINE AND MACROMEDIA FLASH PLAYER 8.5
SAP
"Macromedia is delivering another wave of innovation for the enterprise to unlock valuable back-end data and deliver it to the end user through appealing and powerful applications. At SAP, we're building our Analytics applications with Macromedia Flex, and have been able to build more than 100 analytics applications that are visually stunning, easy to modify and use, and integrate seamlessly into our existing technologies. Macromedia Flash Player 8.5 and the Flex 2 product line will help drive a whole new level of IT value as organizations tap into their Enterprise Services Architecture."
—Roman Bukary, vice president of solution marketing, composite and analytic applications, SAP
IBM Global Services
"Rich client technology is clearly having a positive impact on the quality and effectiveness of user experiences, enabling our clients to more effectively drive revenue, increase customer loyalty, and enhance productivity. The ubiquitous nature of Macromedia Flash Player and the next generation of Macromedia Flex, combined with other core technologies, strong methods, and skills, provide IBM Global Services an approach for developing solutions that deliver on these business drivers."
—Chuck Carney, partner, Center for e-Business Innovation, Boston IBM Global Services
Adaptive Path
"The future of rich Internet applications has always been about offering developers the technologies that are best suited to accomplish the task at hand. At the end of the day, the things that work well with others, like Ajax and Flash, will prevail as they provide developers with building blocks and not road blocks, paving the way to the next generation of web applications."
—Jeffrey Veen, director of product development, Adaptive Path, and founder of MeasureMap.com
Allurent
"At Allurent, we're working to bring rich Internet commerce applications to leading online retailers. Macromedia Flex 2 helps us achieve this through enhanced expressiveness combined with development productivity gains via the new Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2. With the new Flex 2 product line and Macromedia Flash Player 8.5, our customers can reinforce their brands through a better customer experience, and improve their bottom line by reducing shopping cart abandonment and increasing conversion."
—Fumi Matsumoto, co-founder and CTO, Allurent
Dorado
"Macromedia Flex is a complete solution for building cross-platform rich Internet applications. The development productivity improvements in Flex Builder 2, combined with the new Flex Framework, will bring engaging, powerful applications to our customers faster than ever before."
—Kevin Chesney, vice president of architecture, Dorado
ESRI
"With GIS web services, a rich client approach works best because a portion of the data can be processed on the client. Macromedia Flex 2 enables us to streamline the development time it takes to do this. The new features and the new Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2 reduce our overall development cycles, while enabling easy deployment and maintenance of applications with the best possible user experience."
—Mike Tait, director of Internet solutions, ESRI
Genworth Financial
"Gaining valuable insight from financial data is a guiding principle in arming our partners with the best information available to help them make the right financial decisions. Our Flex-based retirement calculator is one of the ways we are addressing this. We're excited about Macromedia Flex 2 and how it will help us address our partners' needs through powerful applications."
—Wheeler Wood, information technology senior analyst, Genworth Financial
Herrlich & Ramuschkat
"The Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2 IDE is an intuitive, productive tool, and it helps me rapidly build applications that enable our customers to improve their businesses. Combined with the rest of the Flex 2 product line, developers can deliver new kinds of applications that contain the best of the desktop and the web."
—Dirk Eismann, software engineer, Herrlich & Ramuschkat GmbH
Innberg
"When we design and build solutions around user needs, we find that the really hard problems can be solved easily with the amazing set of capabilities Flex 2 offers. We're now able to effectively break the existing request-response paradigm. When we combine this new level of innovation with the unmatched productivity of Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2, we can provide transformative business improvements for our customers and their applications."
—Ilya Devers, managing director, Innberg
Washington Group International
"Our development team has been using Flex 1.5 to develop enterprise-level rich Internet applications for the past 10 months. Macromedia has taken the next step in their release of Flex 2, which will provide a significant increase in our developers' productivity. This includes improvements in the enterprise data services, redesign of the object-oriented coding language in Flex, and migrating to an Eclipse-based development environment. Our goal is to provide fully capable applications that can be easily deployed via the web. Flex 2 will help us achieve this in a timely manner."
—Larry Beers, IT development manager, Washington Group International
