Ted Patrick has graciously added the ringdesignonline.com application to his Flickr Flex image gallery. If you haven’t yet visited the gallery, I recommend it as it is very cool to se how Flex is being used in real world apps.

If you haven’t done so yet, please take a minute to complete Tariq’s Flex survey at cflex.net. Here is the info:

1st Bi-Annual Flex Community Survey Now Open!

As part of an effort to tailor resources to where the community is, this survey is designed to take an ecosystem pulse of Flexcoders. Whether you’re just on the fence, or a hardcore megacoder please let us know where YOU’RE at.

** Click here to take survey **

Here is some more information from some of the Adobe Team members reguarding Flex 3.

• Is Flex 3 being rushed out?
  • We are not rushing out Flex 3. The Flex 3 beta has not started and
    is some time away. Once we have a first public alpha or beta, it will
    still be a logn while until we ship. What you are seeing is not about
    us rushing the product, it is about us becoming much more open about
    what is coming down the road in the future. We started this with Adobe
    Labs (initially Macromedia Labs) but in this cycle in the next few
    months you will see up open up more so folks can see the roadmap and
    give us feedback. Keep in mind, we released the first public alpha of Flash at Max in
    October 2005. We had a small private alpha underway for a few months
    before that. But we didn’t ship Flex 2 until June 27 2006. Just
    because we are looking for testers and able to demo so features doesn’t
    mean we are about to ship. It just means we want to give you a view of
    the product before it is baked so you can give us feedback (and also for
    your planning). From when we had our first external testers to when we
    shipped Flex 2 ws almost 12 months. It may not be as long this time
    because it is not such an major architectural change, but we are going
    to let the product bake and stay focused on quality.
    • David Mendals - Adobe
• How will we transition from Flex 2 to 3?
  • Flex 2 was a major architectural release. We changed the VM, the
    language, the framework, and the tool in fundamental and non-compatible
    ways. Flex 3 will not be such a release. We are now able to leverage
    those years of work and build on it incrementally. I think we can add a
    ton of value in areas like productivity, designer developer workflow,
    approachability, etc; but this release will not be a rewrite and will
    not be something each of you needs to relearn and invest heavily to
    migrate to.
    • David Mendals - Adobe
• Why start talking about Flex 3 so early?
  • This release cycle is going to be very different and break the norm
    for how release cycles work at Adobe. We are changing and in the next
    few months this will become crystal clear as to our plans. We need to
    get more community involved in the release to shape the features and
    quality of Flex 3. Overall we are committed to delivering a first
    class framework and development toolset for our customers.
    Flex 3.0 is not right around the corner but will happen in 2007. My
    announcement on Flex 3 earlier this week was to state that we are
    committed to targeting Flash Player 9 for the release.
    • Ted Patrick - Adobe
• Will Flex 3 SDK remain free?
  • Flex SDK will remain FREE.
    • Ted Patrick - Adobe

Well, after a long development cycle, I am proud to announce the release of the all new ringdesignonline.com. This application is the results of many hours of Flex development by myself as well as a large SQL server project for the millions of records of data representing the millions of possible ring combinations, and many hours of design work on the thousands of ring image assets by our talented SQL team and graphics designer.

This is a Flex 2, Cairngorm 2 application utilizing both ColdFusion services and Java Hibernate for data retrieval and persistence. There are many custom features of this designer including the validation button bar, multi row tab navigators, image tool tips, custom preloader, image capture (used in the email a friend functionality), and more.

This designer is also a full blown ecommerce application with this additional functionality scheduled to roll out on 2/1/2007.

This is my largest Flex application to date and I am proud of the way it came out.

Please visit the application and post your comments as they are welcome here.

Rich Tretola

Ted has a new post at http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/01/flex-3-most-important-feature.php where he talks about the future of Flex and also notes that he will be doing a demo of some of the new features of Flex 3 at the 360 conference in March.