Focus: Future Flex

Using Pixel Bender to Create Custom Filters

by Ryan Taylor

Pixel Bender, Adobe's powerful new pixel shader technology for Flash Player 10, is exciting, but do you know how to use it to your best advantage? With Pixel Bender, you can write pixel shaders to do all sorts of image processing tasks, such as blurring, sharpening, and bump mapping, with less code and faster processing power than traditional ActionScript. Ryan Taylor's thorough tutorial on Pixel Bender may amaze you.

Read the Introduction to "Using Pixel Bender to Create Custom Filters"

Eight Things You Should Know About the Text Layout Framework

by Mihai Corlan

What is the Text Layout Framework and why should you care? I'll give you one hint. It has to do with the new Flash Text Engine that Adobe put in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5, and some of the new textual capabilities you'd probably love to use if you didn't have to write so much code. Enter the Text Layout Framework... Read Mihai Corlan's FAQ to learn more.

Read the Introduction to "Eight Things You Should Know About the Text Layout Framework"

Getting Started with the Dreamsocket ActionScript Media Framework

by Kenny Bunch

The Dreamsocket ActionScript Media Framework is a flexible toolkit that helps you to easily integrate image, video, SWF, and audio playback into your applications, with hooks for business functionality around the framework. After years developing this framework, the Dreamsocket team are happy to share it with the community. Kenny Bunch's article is a great introduction to this useful tool.

Read the Introduction to "Getting Started with the Dreamsocket ActionScript Media Framework"

Integrating Flex with Java Using Spring and BlazeDS

by Andrew Powell

Flex, Spring and BlazeDS — Sounds complex and overwhelming? In this tutorial, Andrew Powell takes some of the mystery out of using these technologies together and walks you through setting up an application with the new Spring BlazeDS Integration as well as connecting the Flex application to the middle tier.

Read the Introduction to "Integrating Flex with Java Using Spring and BlazeDS"

Flash Builder 4 Data-Centric Features for ColdFusion Developers

by Robi Sen

In this tutorial, Robi Sen covers some of the new data-centric features in Adobe Flash Builder 4 that allow developers to quickly and easily build Flex applications with a ColdFusion backend.

Read the Introduction to "Flash Builder 4 Data-Centric Features for ColdFusion Developers"