| By Yakov Fain | Article Rating: |
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| May 29, 2008 11:15 AM EDT | Reads: |
20,824 |
It's official: Flex 4, codenamed Gumbo, is now beginning active development. Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. According to Adobe, these are the four major themes that will affect Flex 4:"Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer. Probably involves an additional component model that integrates with the existing Halo components.

Accelerated Development: take application development from concept to reality quickly. Features could include application templates, architectural framework integration, binding improvements.
Horizontal Platform Improvements: features that benefit all application and user types. Features could include compiler performance, language enhancements, BiDi components, enhanced text.
Broadening Horizons: expand the range of applications and use-cases that can leverage Flex. Features could include finding a way to make the framework lighter, supporting more deployment runtimes, runtime MXML."
Accelerated development is definitely the right way to go. Code generators, templates is a must and even Flex 3 with its wizards was a step in the right direction.
I’d allocate the highest priority to the compilation speed improvement and IDE. Flex Builder IDE works fine on small-size projects, but in the real world environment it’s not fun to work with. And I’m not even asking for a decent refactoring or some code editor improvements. I want it to be faster. I do not want it to hang. I do not want it to painfully rebuild the workspace for 30+ seconds.
Making the framework lighter is also a big ticket item. A swf that uses Flex framework should be smaller in the “merge in” mode. One item that I do not see addressed in these plans is printing. Flex printing is rudimentary and has to be addressed.
I wonder if Adobe has set an easy to use way for Flex developers to submit their suggestions to be included in Flex 4 that are reviewed and answered by Flex team?
Since Flex is an open source product, we should have a say too. Looking forward to get a hold of Flex 4 Beta 3 when ready.
Published May 29, 2008 Reads 20,824
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More Stories By Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.
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NN 05/23/08 07:54:52 PM EDT | |||
Yes we should have say in open source platform but way I see it Google and Adobe will do according to own propriety when it comes to add features. I like GWT but again very plain UI with built in library (third party limited not many) Adobe has to be one step ahead with Flex 4 since sliverlight and GWT are not very behind and also reminder that Flex is plug-in base so make it fast and small so others don't have change to argue on that. |
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Glenn William 04/22/08 08:18:53 PM EDT | |||
I was surprised to see you question the availability of communication with the Flex 4 development team. More than any other company I've dealt with Adobe has always had an open approach to contact with it's uses. Flex feature suggestions have been carried forward from the version 3 bug base where there's always been a lot of two way communication. I've posted several suggestions and always received responses. sometimes on the bug reporting \ feature suggestion site & several times direct from development team. The same holds true with the other products in their suite & server packages. I'm in total agreement with all your requested avenues of improvement though. glenn wiliams |
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Flashmattic 04/16/08 10:52:51 AM EDT | |||
Another thing they should put more efforts into is the compilation time. With big scaled projects it is unbearable and Flex3.0 did not provide any significant improvements as promised. |
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