Last August I began researching and exploring the new features and capabilities in the next version of Flex, Flex 4 Gumbo. Adobe has been posting nightly builds of Flex 4 since last summer. Gareth Edwards was nice enough to help me to get set up and compiling the SDK at the time. Juan Sanchez was doing some initial blogging and Ely Greenfield released the infamous video demonstrating the new skinning techniques soon to be available. The Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo) article was originally started as a presentation I was building in late August / early September. (I may still port the content back into a presentation in the near future. The InsideRIA Conference is coming up and a Flex 4 preso might be a good candidate for the “Call for Papers”.)

I’ll have to say this article was a labor of love. We made it through prefix and namespace issues, code updates and also various other updates to the product time line, etc. I really enjoyed working on the article and am very, very pleased that it’s finally been released into the wild. I’d like to thank Rich Tretola for his patience and help during the authoring process and would also like to send out a gigantic thanks to Matt Chotin for the time he provided to review the article. I’d also like to thank Deepa for all of the awesome content on the Adobe Open Source site, my article would not exist without it.

The new Flex 4 landscape is rich with features and improvements. Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst will empower a new sect of designers, devigners and deselopers into the world of Flex based development for the Flash Platform. I’m very excited to see what my Flash brethren bring to the table using Catalyst. I’m also very excited about the Unit Testing automation that’s available and many other developer centric updates that have been included in the Flex 4 framework and in Flash Builder.

When I first started looking into the code for how the new Spark component architecture is structured I got all warm and fuzzy. Spark totally separates the component logic from the view markup which should really standardize component development and also enable a whole new level of skinning and UX for Flex application development.

Anyone looking to upgrade their Flex 3 applications to Flex 4 please get in touch. I’m really excited to start talking about the possibilities of upgrading and refactoring to the new framework. I’m currently working on a Flex 4 application example that makes use of Cairngorm and the new version of Flex Unit so check back for that soon.

Here’s the link to my article, I hope it provides a decent overview of what’s available in Flex 4:
http://www.insideria.com/2009/06/overview-of-flex-4-gumbo.html

It should be an exciting week and the buzz about the beta release is already getting crazy! Here are a couple of important links:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex4sdk_whatsnew.html
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

http://www.ashorten.com/2009/06/01/flash-builder-and-flash-catalyst-betas-now-on-labs/

Happy Flexing!!!