Macromedia offering Flash Player 7 for Linux

Macromedia on Thursday is announcing availability of Flash Player 7 for Linux, a version of the company’s rich Internet client that is bundled with Linux operating systems from several vendors and boasts SOAP support.

Featuring improvements in performance, security, and development capabilities, Flash Player 7 for Linux ships with Linux operating systems distributed by Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and Turbolinux. Flash Player offers integrated graphics, video, audio, and data capabilities for Web applications. The product features Cascading Style Sheets support to blend HTML and Flash with consistent formatting. SOAP support provides Web services connectivity for service-oriented architectures.

Flash Player is a runtime for Internet applications developed with the recently released Macromedia Flex presentation server. It also is the runtime for interactive content created with the Flash authoring tool.

Security enhancements include a tighter security model for cross-domain data sharing, according to the company. Data can be made available to Flash applications through the use of policy files on the Web server that grant access to explicitly named requesting domains. Flash Player also now stores local data defined by Web sites more securely to prevent access by applications or content that is not from the domain that originally created the data.