Adobe has released a new public beta of Flash Player 9 (codenamed “Moviestar”) which is available now on labs.

This update is a big one as there are some very impressive new features which have been added. Additionally, there are numerous bug fixes as well as various newly added features which make this update an important one.

Below is a list of what I feel are the most impressive new features:

1. Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes which has significant benefits as this will allow for much smaller swf file sizes.
2. Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs
3. Multi-core support for vector rendering.
4. Runtime errors can now be thrown from JavaScript to ActionScript via External Interface API

To learn more check out some of the following resources:
Flash Player 9 update
Press Release

I have updated the AIR Cairngorm framework to support itemClasses so as to allow developers to specify an itemClass on a SQLService instance.

The SQLStatement class in Adobe AIR defines a public property “itemClass” (typically a VO), which, if specified will be used as the data type for each row returned by a SQLStatement execution result.

Developers utilizing the AIR Cairngorm framework can now set a specific itemClass as an additional argument for each SQLService. execute(); invocation.

The updated source, example and air-cairngen projects can be downloaded here.