Looking Ahead at the Next Version of Flex

This was the first regular session of MAX I attended. It was led by Ely Greenfield whose blog I check from time to time. He was talking about Flex Gumbo (Flex 4) and to some degree Flex Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo).

There are a lot of changes in Flex 4 which are necessary strictly for Catalyst to work correctly and he spent a large portion of time on them. For those of you who don't know (and I didn't before this conference) Catalyst allows a designer to take a user interface they have mocked up in Photoshop, import it into Catalyst, mark parts as 'button' or 'scroll bar' and even set transitions and animations, and then save all of their changes as a Flex Project! This means that developers can be handed a nice intuitive user interface and simply do what they do best, put in all of the business logic, without being worried about color schemes and glossy buttons.

It also means that the designer can make changes to the UI at any time without having to bother the developer. The designer simply reopens the project in Catalyst, makes the necessary changes, and saves them and the next time the developer opens his project the new UI will be in place without having bothered his code.

All of this is accomplished via the new Spark Architecture from Adobe which basically divorces visual components from their data and behavior. Don't worry about your old projects not working though because Adobe has created a new set of components (FxComponents) to take advantage of this new architecture, so all of the old components will still behave the same as always.

The way this data is passed around adobe products (Photoshop, Catalyst, etc) is through a new interaction language called FXG, a graphics format based upon MXML, which all Adobe products can read.

Flex Catalyst is a completely declaritive language (think mxml) and adds a few new metadata tages like SkinPart and SkinStates which help define things like parts of buttons and the states of those buttons.

There is also a new MXML Graphics library containing things like Fill and Stroke. These graphics objects are 1st class citizens in flex, making them usable just like any other object. This includes a new GraphicElement which is a graphics base class created purely for the purpose of rendering graphics and improving performance.

The new FlexText objects allow more liberties with text within a Flex application. This includes fading and rotating among others. Flex now has a very powerful ability to produce top quality text which is one of the reasons the NY Times is developing an AIR application.

There has been an effort to make states easier to understand inside of MXML by putting an inState property on components instead of the old state tree. This is one case where you can not use new and old styles together. A file must use one or the other.

A number of other small changes were discussed, including that if you wish to add non-visual components to your mxml you can't simply add a tag but must wrap it inside of a tag. Otherwise non visual components will be left out.

Other changes include:

• Container tag has changed to Group
• List class is now DataGroup class/tag
• 3D effects now built in! (FX:Rotate3D)
• 2-way data binding! (value='@{bindvalue}')
• increased compiler performance! (2x-5x faster)

We were given a latest and up-to-datest copy of the new Flex Builder and Flex Catalyst but unfortunately it was for Mac only and those of us in the Windows world will have to carry on a bit longer (January or February) before we can play with both of these together.