Now that Central 1.5 is live I would like to contribute some developer-centric information on how the new feature set helped us in a just finished project for one of our customers.Basically, they use the Central platform to support their sales men on their sales business. More concrete infos on the project soon to come. But now for some technical stuff :)

First, Central 1.5 now fully supports all Flash Player 7 features while offering some more functionality. The most interesting one - especially when it comes to developing applications that should run offline, too - is the File IO API that let's you read/write files on the user's machine while remaining the security sandbox metaphor intact. This feature enables you to write directly to XML files for example - ne need to serialize your data to Shared Objects that are not human readable anymore. But you can also open mp3 files on the user's drive if he gave the permission do to that.

Together with the very effective caching functionality the File IO features simply rock! The key idea behind the caching is simple: if Central is online and you request a remote file (no matter how: XML.load(), LoadVars.load(), MovieClip.loadMovie(), ...) Central fetches this file - nothing special about that. You can then add this URL to Central's cache by calling addToLocalInternetCache(url) - the next time you request a cached URL, e.g. myXML.load(url) Central checks its cache and returns the cached file. If it's not there, Central gets the online version - very easy and effective. Now, suppose your offline: again, calling myXML.load(url) returns the cached version - you simply have to do nothing about it, the data loading calls are checking the cache subsystem and do their stuff. Very cool!

Another killer feature of the File IO API is the upload feature. I'm sure this will cause a lot of discussion, especially arguments like: "hey, if it is in Central, why can't we have it in the Flash Player, too?" - honestly, I don't know if this feature will be added to the regular Flash Player but it would be extremely helpful.

Central 1.5 also supports AS 2.0 and the v2 component framework, making it easier to maintain look & feel. Although the Central SDK comes with an own collection of the v2 components that are optimized for Central, 90% of the standard Flash MX 2004 components work in Central 1.5, too. This is not supported by Macromedia however but it works ;). This enabled us to create an application that runs in Central 1.5 and (with a limited feature set) in the browser, too. This is done with simple AS 2.0 inheritence: the main application logic acts as an superclass for the BrowserApp and the CentralApp classes which in turn overwrite/extend the main class to their needs - effective and easy.

The development process which was awkward in Central 1.0 has been optimized and offers developers now an integrated wizard in Flash MX 2004 that helps building and deploying Central 1.5 projects. Still it is not optimal, though: Central applications have to run inside the Central shell to test them so you have to switch between Flash and Central and real debugging is not possible. Anyway, I am really looking forward to Central 2.0 and give enough user input I am pretty sure this will be optimized.

Best of all, the Central licensing has been optimized. You can choose between two flavours: either you distribute your product as a try & buy product (for US residents only at the moment) or you choose the Open Distribution program which enables you to just distribute your application at your like. The best: it's free, baby - no more per seats/per year licensing. For more information check this link.

In summary Central 1.5 is worth checking out (I think so) - stay tuned for more information on our latest project, too. Here are some official links concerning 1.5:

• http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/
• http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/productinfo/whatsnew/
• http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/productinfo/gettingstarted/
• http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/central/

Dirk.

PS: oh, and there's the new AIM/ICQ integration layer, basic Flex support and other things to examine!