Flex Builder 3 Public Beta released

Adobe Flex Builder 3 beta 3 has been released on Adobe Labs.

This public prerelease version continues Adobes 'new, more transparent product development process, providing frequent, regular access to early builds and greater insight into the feature roadmap and planning process'.

This final beta release focuses on overall quality and performance, providing a final look at Flex Builder 3 prior to launch.

New major Flex 3 features are (1, 2):

• Native support for Adobe AIR – Flex 3 introduces new components and incorporates the Adobe AIR development tools into the SDK and Flex Builder.
• Persistent framework caching – You can make Flex 3 applications as small as 50K when leveraging the new Flash Player cache for Adobe platform components.
• Flex Builder productivity enhancements – Flex Builder 3 introduces refactoring support, new profilers for performance and memory tuning, and code generation tools for data access.
• Integration with Creative Suite 3 – The Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 allows Flash CS3 users to build components that can be seamlessly integrated into a Flex application, while Flex Builder 3 adds new wizards for importing assets from CS3 applications as skins.
• Advanced DataGrid – The Advanced DataGrid is a new component that adds commonly requested features to the DataGrid such as support for hierarchical data, and basic pivot table functionality.
• First steps toward open source Flex. As a first step toward making Flex an open source project, we've opened up the Flex and Flex Builder bug tracking system to the public, as well as published detailed roadmap information.