Flex 4 is Here and I Love It

by Leif Wells

Level 101

It's been two years since the Adobe Flex 3 SDK and Adobe Flex Builder 3 were released, and in that time, a lot of things have changed in the Flex world. With the Flex 4 SDK released in March, we take this opportunity to look at where we’ve been and where we are going.

A Little History

Flex, as readers of Flex Authority well know, is Adobe Systems' MXML — and ActionScript-based framework for creating rich Internet applications on the Flash Platform. Released in February of 2008, Flex 3 was, in many developer’s minds, the first rock-solid release of the framework, unleashing the potential power of the Flash Platform. Upon release, Adobe announced that the Flex SDK would become open source software under the Mozilla Public License. At the same time, they released AIR 1.0, Adobe’s desktop runtime that allows for the development of Flash Platform applications with offline capabilities. So web-based and desktop-based applications could both be built with the Flex framework.

What's Happened Since Flex 3

With Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 out of the way, the Flex Engineering Team started work on the next version of Flex, codenamed "Gumbo." The focus on this release would be around a new component set that would allow an easier skinning process, a more rapid and fluid development process, and support for new features in Flash Player 10. In concert with the Flex 4 development path, Adobe began developing Flash Catalyst, a user interface development tool aimed at enabling designers to become more integrated in the RIA development process. Flex 4, Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Catalyst were released in March 2010.

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