Mike Downey drops Flash 9's codename. The name Blaze is the only thing being announced at the moment but it will be interesting to see how the featureset will be affected by the Adobe acquisition. Mike gives us some more tangible information on the forthcoming Flash 8.5 release.

We can't comment on the timeframe for the release of BLAZE but it will be a full cycle so don't expect anything to be coming any time soon. That said, you've probably already heard about the upcoming release of Flash Player 8.5 with an alpha available in a few weeks and a ship date next spring. Flash Player 8.5 will add a new virtual machine, AVM2, and a new programming language, ActionScript 3.0. This player release will coincide with the release of FlexBuilder 2, the new Eclipse-based developer tool for creating rich Flash-based applications.

This is getting pretty exciting. On another note, I'm somewhat annoyed the Web 2.0 community usually doesn't include Flash in its discussions. Isn't it in some case far more capable at getting the job done? AJAX is fantastic but I could certainly see a few ways the two could cooperate. With its near ubiquitous reach, new open philosophy and (now) robust drawing engine Flash can now easily deliver the goods.