Since Adobe made the brave decision to open-source the Flex SDK at the beginning of the year it has steadily been gaining widespread penetration within the developing community. The upcoming version of Flex (version 4, codenamed Gumbo), is scheduled to be released in beta over the next few months with a final release in 2009.
Flex effectively consists of two main components - firstly the 'MXML compiler' which converts Flex's XML language into Actionscript 3.0, and secondly a huge library of classes and components which make up the 'Flex Framework'. Both of these components are being upgraded in tandem for Gumbo in order to extend the component capabiliries, to assist the implementation of a new state architecture and to provide backwards compatibility with Flex 3 components.
Although there are various things that will be changing, the focus from Adobe seems to be on streamlining the designer/developer workflow; with this in mind they have completely revamped the component skinning mechanism (which has traditionally been one of the weakest points of previous Flex versions) allowing the user to style their application using a much simpler process. Adobe have created a new graphics format called FXG (presumably standing for FleX Graphics) which is an XML vector graphics description language similar to SVG. We can probably expect Flex Builder 4 to include tools for manipulating FXG graphically, and its also likely that the next version of the Flash IDE will also be able to import and export FXG format.
The final piece in the Flex puzzle is an upcoming Adobe application codenamed ‘Thermo’ which currently has no official release date, although the rumours say that “people will have something to experiment with next year”. Thermo will be a graphical IDE that allows users to create graphics and directly turn them into a Flex application. This could have a huge impact on the way that designers and developers collaborate – no more chopping up JPEGs and exporting Photoshop layers; the designers create their design in Thermo, and the developers make it go in MXML and Actionscript 3. We can expect Adobe to give Thermo a familiar Creative Suite interface which will make it easier for designers to switch over to Thermo. When you stop and think about how much time developers spend implementing the designers vision it’s easy to see how this tool has amazing potential to get better quality results quicker.
The Gumbo development page is available at http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo, a few screenshots of Thermo are already up on http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo and there is a short Thermo presentation video at http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/december2007/video/index.html.
Dave
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