Flex 4 - Latest Upcoming Features For Flex Development?

By Author: Johnmac
Total Articles: 4
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Flex has been popular since its introduction in the market and is widely used by Flex developers for developing rich internet applications which would leave people mesmerized. Flex development of course includes lot of things which have evolved to become part of Flex over a period of time. The different versions of Flex, the most recent being Flex 4 represent this evolution process.

The beta version of the fourth version of Flex for Flex development has been in the market for some time now. Its development was a general process unlike others where the company develops the products securely at its office and one fine day announces its launch. During the development process Flex 4 was code named Gumbo. It was developed on the open source site meaning developers from around the world can write, change or edit the code. While most of the features of Flex 3 remain unchanged there were a few features which saw some changes.

A prominent change in the Flex development version has been the use of namespaces. There are three main reasons why namespaces are used in Flex, they can be listed as below:

1) Lets Flex ...
... developer know the language version of the language being used.

2) Helps map XML tag to Actionscript by disclosing the scope.

3) Reveals the location of the custom components to compiler.

Flex 4 uses MXML 2009 namespace, which gives it new language tags which are prefixed with Fx. Hence all components will be declared in their own namespaces. As said earlier most of the tags of Flex 3 have remained same in flex 4 but here are a few like fx.library, fx.declarations and fx.private which have changed because of the Namespace.

1) fx:Declarations are now not permitted to be under the application root on their own.

2) There are chances that the fx:Private tag will contain additional features to make it easier to use.

3) fx:Library has been made reusable.

Declarative graphics is another thing that changes in Flex 4 which would be used to develop rich internet applications using Flex development. Good use of FXG which is a format for graphics interchange generally used for CS4 graphics applications. Both Flash Player 10 and Flex 4 will be now able to deliver FXG based graphical elements like bitmaps, masks, gradients, alphas etc.

New effects which can also apply to FXG graphical elements have been included in the latest Flex development version Flex 4. Single effects should not be included in body but within fx:Declarations tags of the applications. Besides this Flash Catalyst has many more effects which makes using the effects easier.

CSS which is pivotal to the skinning of components has also seen many improvements. An id selector and descendant selector have been included to help developers add style to the component. Layout is another section which has seen improvements with the inclusion of Application tag aimed to display all the three layouts at a time. Components which were previously required to be programmed every time for switching to a specific state now always exist. This would ensure zero failures because the flash developer missed to include a variable.

iFlexweb as the name suggests is a Flex development company and believes in being hand in hand with the latest technology. Flex 4 has been really nice and easy to grasp.