Some time ago I was asked by the directors here at IE to explain what Flex was, how it was different to Flash, and why I had been using it in some of our interactive projects. My initial attempt, off the top of my head, was poor - I quickly discovered that it’s not an easy concept to explain!

I was encouraged, therefore, to see that Adobe have also realised that it is confusing to those who aren’t geeked-up on all things Flash, and relaunced the Flash Platform label at their Max conference last week. The Flash Platform brings together all the different technologies that contribute to Flash-based projects, as shown in this handy diagram.

So having failed to explain it properly the first time, I did then go away and think about it and wrote an explanation of the way I understand it, which I have copied below. I seem to have unwittingly explained some of the other parts of the Flash Platform as well.

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The much anticipated launch of Adobe’s CS4 product range and Flash Player 10 happened today.This brings with it many exciting new developments.

Creative Suite 4

Whatever you think about the logo (and the price), the products in the new CS4 suite bring some major improvements. There’s the content-aware scaling in Photoshop, which somehow identifies the key parts of an image, and scales the bits around them. As well as more advanced 3D editing tools, improvements to smart objects, and increased non-destructive editing abilities.

I’m also glad to see the back of the annoying floating windows, with the introduction of a new tab-based unified UI accross all products. Plus there’s much closer integration with the former Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver). While CS3 went some way towards this, they only had half of a product cycle to do it, but now they’ve had a full one it should be air-tight.

Flash Player 10

The thing I’m most excited about however, is the introduction of 3D to flash as I mentioned in a previous post. This is a significant advancement and something that many of us have been awaiting for a long time. Not to mention the introduction of After Effects-style motion path editing and inverse kinematics tools.

All of us at IE are keen to embrace new technology, so expect to see some great new projects from us in the near future.

There is much debate about the best backend for Flex applications. Here at IE we’re using PHP, mainly because it’s what we know, and what we’re good at. We’ve also been using the Zend Framework for our PHP development for some time now.

So we were very encouraged yesterday, when we saw that Adobe and Zend have announced that they are collaborating to make the integration between the Zend Framework and the Flex Framework even better. It’s always nice to hear that what you’ve been doing anyway is being officially recognised as a good way of doing it!

Read more about the collaboration on the Flex Team Blog.