FlexManiacs - Matt Chotin on the Future of Flex

Matt has worked on Flex since the start, and gave an interesting talk about the plans for the future of Flex. He began by telling us about a number of Flex based applications which have come out over the past couple of years. Including Photo editors, product configurators and

Yahoo Maps.

A new Flex SDK download takes place every 26 seconds. There are now 20 Flex user groups, many books have been published and many more are planned.

• Many companies including salesforce.com have added a

  Flex API to their products.

• Adobe Media Player and Adobe Premier Express have been

  built with Flex.

• Flash Player is the most widely adopted piece of

  internet Software, so flex is a good choice for your new

  rich interface applications.

Open Source

applications.

New bug tracker uses Jira and is available at http://bugs.adobe.com/flex will allow everyone to file bugs and enhancement requests. Also available is a Wiki where the development roadmap is being published.

The SDK now has daily builds at labs.adobe.com Flex 3 Beta is now available and between Max and Q1 2008 a full open source and flex3 launch will happen.

Flex 3

Integration with Designer Developer Workflow in CS3 Flexbuilder has a new import wizard to allow easy import of assets from CS3.

You can also create Flex components in Flash CS3 using the Flex Component Kit in Flash. Ensures that what is built in Flash is compatible.

You can now open CSS style sheet in the Design View and see the effects of changes to your app.

Design view now support pixel perfect positioning. A New constraints model has be developed to allow alignment along different vertical or horizontal lines.

The Skinning Model has been enhanced so that states can be used to simplify styling. An MXML file can now define all the states of your skin.

There is a new Advanced Data Grid component, with support for new formatting features. Heirarchical data displays and Flexible grouping and sorting.

Charting has also been enhanced.

List and Tilelist has been improved to more easily create transitions like those in Flex Store.

Web services have been improved to allow code hinting when calling Web Services.

New version of the wizard CRUD creator will create PHP, ASP and Flex update applications.

AIR

Drag and Drop from Flex to and From AIR applications.

Local Database access through SQL Lite.

Platform Evolution

New caching for the Flex Framework in the next version of

Flash Player will allow Flex base code to be shared between

sites.

Memory and performance Profiling is available in the Flex 3

Beta.

Source code Refactoring will alow easy renaming of

variables.

Many Flex Application are expected to act in conjunction

with an HTML wrapper and the stub code for Flex-AJAX bridge

will automatically be generated by Flex 3.

Deep linking can be used in the browser to allow the URL to

reflect the state of the Flex Application. URL can be used

to go to a particular state in the Flex application.

Support for Custom Components has been improved in Flex

Builder.