Flex, Adobe's open-source rich-client development environment, has been on center stage at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco. In time for the conference, Adobe released significant updates to the open-source Flex SDK, as well as to its AIR desktop runtime, and to FlexBuilder.

Most of the updates center around enabling support for the latest Flash 10 virtual machine features. In an overview article, Flex product manager Matt Chotin, writes that:

While the Flex framework does not explicitly use any new [Flash 10 VM] functionality, developers can write code that takes advantage of the new features in the latest release of the Flash Player...

Most interesting among the Flash 10 features that can now be used from Flex applications is PixelBender, a new graphics library. PixelBender works in tandem with the new, hardware-accelerated graphics API in Flash Player 10 to help achieve stunning graphics effects, writes Justin Everett-Church, a product manager for Flash Player 10:

[PixelBender] lets us incorporate the ability for designers to add their own fills, blend modes, and filters to their SWF files instead of having to bake them into Flash Player...

With one feature we have essentially added an infinite number of filters without making users wait for another release or making Flash Player bigger... This feature gets even better, though, because Pixel Bender can do more than just image manipulation. It can do math computation, and when combined with other features, it can also do audio filters.

When possible, PixelBender performs graphics-related computations on the GPU, relieving the CPU of that task. An online demo of PixelBender is available on the Adobe Labs Web site (requires Flash Player 10).

The same sort of hardware-assisted processing is used in FlashPlayer 10's 3D API, writes Everett-Church:

Add a new dimension to your applications and extend the creative possibilities by easily transforming and animating any 2D display object through 3D space, while retaining all of the interactivity that exists in 2D space. Create complex effects with simple code by nesting 3D-transformed objects inside each other. Inheritance makes it easy to rapidly apply changes across objects in intuitive ways...

For users who are looking to work with 3D on a lower level or for those that use community 3D engines, Flash Player 10 includes new capabilities in the drawing API to draw a complex shape out of a series of triangles, mapping textures through the use of UV coordinates.

As well, Flash Player 10 includes a new text engine with much improved font rendering and right-to-left and vertical text layout capabilities. Those changes, as well as greatly improved performance, are now available from Flex applications as well.

The main new features in Adobe's desktop runtime, AIR, also center around support for Flash Player 10, in addition to providing an encrypted local data store and support for latest WebKit version, explain Rob Christensen and Luis Polanco, both on the AIR team:

By popular request from developers, we've added a way of encrypting the local database inside of AIR. While encrypting data in AIR has been possible since AIR 1.0, using the Encrypted Local Store (ELS)—the new encryption support—offers better support for encrypted larger data files and is generally more convenient since many developers prefer to persist using the local database...

The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode interpreter that improves the execution speed of JavaScript for common actions. Our internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.

What do you think of the latest Flex and AIR features?