Last month I blogged about the release of Adobe Flash Builder for PHP 4.5. Today Adobe released version 4.5.1 which completes last month’s launch with optimized iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Blackberry support!
It seems many people have been confused re: what iOS support really means. Let me clarify. This is not about when you’d choose Flash vs. HTML 5 in the browser. The product does support targeting Flash in the browser but what excites me the most is the availability of the Flex framework for delivering native mobile experiences on iOS, Android and other devices. It addresses one of the biggest pain points our customers have with mobility and I see no one else on the market addressing it in such a complete manner (although many are addressing various aspects of the problem).
Adobe has done a great job in making it dead simple to deliver native mobile apps. They have delivered on strong IDE-based tooling, a very extensive application framework (Flex) and great runtime performance making it run at near native speeds on a broad range of devices. Best of all, the deep integration with PHP & Zend Studio enables us to deliver a strong client (Air)-server(PHP) development experience. All at really compelling price points!
So how does iOS support work? Adobe cross compiles to native ARM machine code. These apps are self contained, can be distributed via the Apple Store and perform well.
As mentioned earlier, today we are shipping 4.5.1 which completes iOS & Blackberry support. Get your 60 day trial - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder-php.html
