Spark And Fxg In Flex4 Add New Life To Flex Development

By Author: Harry Barter
Total Articles: 21
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Any site with rich internet applications is sure to be loved by its viewers. Flex development techniques are widely used for developing RIA solutions. Adobe the company credited for developing Flex is in continuous race to improve its product offerings. The recent introduction by the company is Flex 4 which is armed with Spark and FXG.

Why did it think of bringing Spark and FXG to the Flex development world? The biggest challenge Adobe faced while introducing Flex and its subsequent products was to ensure that the platform made the daunting task of rich internet application development for websites easier for the Flex developers. The challenges faced can also be listed as below:

->Giving developers a framework that would help them develop third generation applications and has easy integrity with various tools

->Help Flex developers develop RIAs in less time which could be achieved by providing better compilers and adding enhancements like data features that would increase productivity

->Considering the maximum capacity ...
... of the modern Flash player and adding features required by common use-cases

Inclusion of Spark and FXG in Flex4 the latest Flex development platform ensures that Adobe is able to successfully meet with all these challenges. Spark aims to fulfill the first challenge of the company which was to help Flex developers create third generation applications without any limitations. It is a modern component and skinning architecture developed a top of MX architecture. Flex developers and website designers can work together to ensure their Flex application looks and feels exceptional.

Another praiseworthy quality of Flex 4 is that it supports FXG a commonly use XML syntax to define vector graphics in applications. It is effective to transform files from different formats and is nearly similar to Flash Player 10 rendering model. It is very helpful for completing Flex development projects where vector images are required to be created in tools like Fireworks, Illustrator and Photoshop and then transported to Flex in .fxg format.

Flex 4 also benefits from the more flexible runtime-assignable layout model of Spark architecture. These layouts support 2D scales and rotations as well as have the ability to include 3D capabilities of Flash Player 10. Flex development with the new layout mechanism supports regular container model which is very important for virtualization. It also supports virtualization in List classes.

Spark also paves way to make animation using Flex 4 easier by including an improvised animation engine. All three planes and complex keyframe-based animations can perform functions like transformations, Pixel Bender filters applied as effects and auto-reversing of transitions. A Flex developer will also be surprised to note how states work in the recent version. States in Flex 3 has faced good amount of criticism because Flex developers over the world thought it could be better. Some additions to MXML language have been made to enhance states working.

To increase productivity of Flex developer involved in Flex development some actions like implementation of common use cases have been taken to increase performance of the compiler. Some improvements to the ASDoc tool can also be seen.

iFlexweb believes in developing rich internet applications which really appear and feel rich with the help of latest Flex development techniques including Flex 4.