Aral Balkan

In case you haven't heard -- Ted did use a lot of boldface, ALL CAPS, BOLDCASE ALLCAPS, and BOLDCASE ITALIC ALLCAPS in his announcement :) -- Flex has succumbed to media pressure about its burgeoning weight problem and has gone under the knife to shed its extra pounds (ooh, this must be what it feels like to write for those trashy magazines!)

In the upcoming Flex 3 release and Flash 9 player update, the Flash Player will begin caching the Flex framework.

What does this mean?

It means that the first time you load a Flex application, the Flex framework will get cached. The next time you load a Flex application, you won't download the framework again.

So what does that mean?

Let's say that your Flex application is made up of 100KB custom code and 500KB Flex Framework code. Let's also say that Joe Impatient, who uses Yahoo Web Messenger (which is a Flex application), decides to give your application a shot. Joe will be pleasantly surprised to see that he only has to download 100KB before your application is ready to go. (He will already have the framework cached from when he ran that other Flex app.)

This is definitely a step in the right direction and I hope that the same thing will be available for Flash too in the future. In fact, although I'm familiar with the reasons why Adobe doesn't want to do it, I still maintain that having the components actually be part of the player would totally rock. This, though, is a very close alternative and does have the advantage that the Flash Player and components can have separate release cycles.

Read more about the new Flex player cache feature on Ted's blog.

Comments

• That's great news! No we just need everyone to get up to date with version 9!

  by Rob on 2007-06-07 20:27:19

• Not sure lipo is the best description. We were carrying 500Kb of features around but "Lipo" implies that what we removed was pure fat. I cannot wait for you to get involved in shaping Flex Open Source. Great post Aral! Ted :)

  by Ted Patrick on 2007-06-07 21:17:45

• Hey Ted, Tongue-in-cheek, man. Of course, it's 500KB of features :) Take care, Aral

  by aral on 2007-06-07 21:45:27

• What are Adobe's reasons for not including the component framework's AS into the Flash Player (or cache it as Flex will do)?

  by David Bellerive on 2007-06-07 22:48:50

• David, If we embedded the framework in the Player, we would need to change it more frequently and it would make a mess for backward compatiblity. The Player Cache is the best of both worlds. The cache is extensible, forward, and backward compatible and provides all the benefits of the cache within the player. Cheers, Ted :)

  by Ted Patrick on 2007-06-08 04:53:53

• "I still maintain that having the components actually be part of the player would totally rock" I was blogging about this in my blog the other day* and I agree, I guess would be a great addition. I was thinking how "unfair" was for Flash developers not having a set of components just out of the box as HTML developer have. I guess that adding the components to the player itself would still allow developers interested in creating their own components. However, i guess that in the long term pretty much all of them would just use the default ones. I would love to see an opened discussion about this. Cheers! Juan * (Spanish!) http://www.dandolachapa.com/2007/05/23/una-de-componentes/

  by Zarate on 2007-06-08 11:34:11

• I agree with Zarate... I mean, I think this is the ultimate condition AND I think a discussion would be good. On the one hand, it'd be great for all the obvious reasons... but on the other hand, some components are much more advanced than simply a checkbox or pushbutton. For example, I found a (albeit minor) but in a very recent version of the combo box. I'm thinking that if you just stuck with plain old controls then maybe it's possible to make them work in the player. The problem is when you get into advanced components I think.

  by Phillip Kerman on 2007-06-09 16:22:19

• "bug" not "but"... now, if I found a "butt" THAT would be something.

  by Phillip Kerman on 2007-06-09 16:23:14

• Ah, that would explain so many things about the combo box, Phillip! :P

  by aral on 2007-06-11 09:16:21