Recently, I have blogged about how incredibly cool Adobe's javascript framework—Spry—is and what potential it has for making great dynamic web content.  In those posts, I was talking about Spry pre-release version 1.5.  Up until 1.4, it would not seem that Adobe was too terribly interested in marketing Spry.  After all, there had not been even a logo created for the project, and the online documentation and samples was incredibly difficult to navigate.  With 1.4, Adobe made the smart move of bundling Spry into Dreamweaver CS3, with native Dreamweaver support for Spry tags and functions, a major benefit for noobs like me getting their feet wet with a javascript framework.  

However, about a month after the release of Dreamweaver CS3, the Spry team released 1.5.  It included some seriously cool updates on all fronts–data, widgets and effects.  But for whatever reason, they did not release a Dreamweaver updater.  This means that to use 1.5, the user had to download it and replace the bundled 1.4 files with the new version.  While not a huge deal, it is not particularly helpful for Dreamweaver support of the new features as they were not included in the original release.  As a plus, a major overhaul of documentation came with 1.5, but still no logo and a still generally uncompelling web presence.

But today marks a new day.  All the sins of Spry's past have been atoned with the release of 1.6

As with 1.5, 1.6 includes some ridiculously cool new features.  One of the major issues that 1.6 addresses is web standards.  In previous versions, there were often unavoidable conflicts created with accepted web standards, particularly in relation to the Spry data regions.  Apparently these issues have been addressed and resolved in 1.6 which eliminates much of the apprehension in the development community concerning Spry.  

On the aesthetics front, Spry FINALLY has a logo.  While I am not particularly impressed with it, it is not terrible and it is nice to at least have some identity to associate with Spry.  To match the logo, Adobe has also finally created a usable portal for Spry.  It includes significant simplification and organization of the documentation and samples–very clean, shiny and uncluttered; it's about time!

But probably the biggest buzz that 1.6 will generate is that a Dreamweaver CS3 updater has finally been released.  Not only will allow for the automatic updating of the javascript libraries, but it was also update the all-important native Dreamweaver support for the updates.  Now all I need to do is get CS3 at home…

Anyway, I am very excited to start playing around with this, and I hope to post some examples of my experiments soon.