Jun 29, 2006 News Wire

Flash Player 9 is out (but not yet for Linux) with the new, high-performance ActionScript 3.0 virtual machine used by Flex and slick automatic updates.

If you’ve got Flash Professional 8, you can now download a preview of the ActionScript 3.0 support coming in Flash Professional 9, currently slated for release in 2007.

You know JavaScript is considered a “real language” when people start optimizing their code for performance. This 3rd party update to Prototype adds special handling of simple cases to greatly boost performance.

Safari now has a full-featured JavaScript debugger!

At 16-minute screencast demonstrating the features of FireBug 0.4, the indispensable developer extension for Firefox.

An interesting demo of how Microformats can be used with Microsoft’s “Live Clipboard” technology to enable pieces of information to be “copied” out of one web page and “pasted” into another. This proof-of-concept works in IE only for now.

Though Flash Player 9 (as required for Flex 2 applications) is out, it is not yet available for Intel Macs (or Linux, for that matter). This work-around requires you to run your browser in PowerPC emulation mode, but it’ll do the trick if you’re desperate

This significant update to ColdFusion focuses largely on new functionality for acting as the back-end for Flex 2 applications.

Some early hints as to what will be in the next major release of ColdFusion. So far, it’s a bit of a yawn-fest: integration with Adobe LiveCycle for generating PDFs and integration with Breeze for generating presentations.

Fear not Intel Mac users (there are several here at SitePoint) — Flash Player 9 (required for running Flex 2 applications) for Intel Mac is due out in beta form in the next couple of days.

This update to Rails closes a security hole that could enable an attacker to consume large amounts of CPU time on a server.

In much the same way as Flickr allows 3rd party applications to access a user’s Flickr photos, Google now supports secure authentication for Google accounts (Gmail, etc.) from within 3rd party apps.

Adobe has released this open source collection of design patterns for building applications with Flex 1.5 and the just-released Flex 2. This toolkit has been used for years within Adobe Consulting, and is now freely available to all.