Deepa started the conversation straight away with mentioning that Flex 4.5 (hero) preview was released to the public yesterday night.  Go ahead and download/try it now!

In an overview of her presentation, she placed a lot of emphasis on the performance of this new build.  This is real good since one of my earlier post mentioned that Flex 4′s performance decreased by about 3 times less than Flex 3.  Everyone from now on will be built around performance in mind (she even repeated it 3 times, a la Ballmer).

The new SDK will include both desktop and mobile components in one, and will include touchscreen functionality automatically.  It will all be built it and will know which one to target when compiling.  This is a real good idea since it increases code reuse without really thinking about it.

She goes on to mention that the Datagrid is also a very big part of the new SDK, but she won’t go too much into it since there’s a talk just about the Datagrid (which I will be attending).  But as a quick reminded, performance and a lot of extra features are being added since this will replace both the MX Datagrid and AdvandedDatagrid.

Another feature is the improvement of the RSLs.  Essentially, RSLs are no longer just one massive swz, but it will be separated in several smaller swz and your application will only load the RSLs it needs.  The RSLs will also be cached so that you don’t have to reload your RSL over and over.  This will greatly reduce startup time and load time of your application.  Awesome.

Deepa also mentioned that the compiler is also being revamped.  The incremental compilation time and memory usage will be reduced by 20%.  Good news for people who are big on compiling often.

Another big part of Flex is that Adobe is now changing the development process of the product.  They are now going to do a 6 month release calendar for Flex.  They are also releasing test units for the Flex code and will let the users submit patches for the SDK after they pass these tests and then be reviewed by the development team.  This is great news since now expert Flex developers can send things that they can fix and Adobe will include it in a later build.  Great use of the community on this.

She goes on to talk about ‘Enterprise Enablement’.  These are enterprise solutions that can be very useful for large application, like a better printing and accessibility support, better internationalization that does automatic language detection and better component extensibility across all components to make it easier to change and reuse the SDK code.

She finishes with saying that they are concentrating hard on speed.  Improving not just the components, but the core itself, like the language (which could definitely use a revamp), RPC (including the network layer and full REST) and native Flash Player features that can be leveraged in Flex.

Now introducing Falcon, a brand new compiler made for Flex from scratch to fix a lot of problems that are now there.  It also has deep integration with Flash Builder which will make it a lot more like a Java style of coding (live problem displaying, analytic, etc).   This is the first talk of it in public and hoping to share this amazingness with us within a year.  This will definitely change the landscape of the development cycle and hopefully entice more developers to use Flex.

The next announcement is huge.  Adobe is working on Flash Player to include threading, but make it simple enough for people to use without thinking too much about locks.  They will offload work to a thread (serialization, calculations, etc) and keep the UI running smooth as silk.  It’s about damn time!  I’m extremely ecstatic at this announcement since this will be a new era for Flex development.  I actually did mention of threading being a problem with Flex in a earlier post (which an Adobe employee mentioned that it actually went around the office when I wrote it).  Wow, just wow.  Exciting time to be a Flex developer.

That’s all for now folks.  There’s a ‘meet the team’ tonight that will listen in on our feedback.  If there’s anything you want me to ask, just comment on this post.

It integrates completely with Eclipse (and Flash Builder) and has this neat feature called CodeSync that makes sure your model and code is always persisted between each other.  In other words, everything works together in an integrated workflow to save you time.

I’ll have to dig deeper, try this out on projects and do a complete review.  In the meantime, please support this initiative by registering and posting on the forum.

They’ve put a lot of thought into the design of the framework. For instance, the ‘declarations’ tag to separate visual and non-visual components. The spark architecture also decouples the skin and layout portion from the business and interface of all component; a very smart design concept that adds a lot more power to Flex components and encourages interchangeability and re-usability of code.  Here’s a quick graphic that compares the Flex 3 and 4 components:

It’s just too bad they didn’t redo all of the components; There are still quite a few components that are still stuck in the Halo architecture, like the dreaded DataGrid and Charts.  I hope this changes very soon because in my line of work, those components are used (and frustrated over) on a daily basis.

Here are a few quick points that I noticed while developing with Flash Builder:

• ‘organize imports’ doesn’t work properly.
• ‘correct indentation’ only works on selected text.
• Better project refresh when changing files.
• ASDoc and FlexUnit integration.
• NetworkMonitor.  No more need for HTTPFox or Firebug
• Data services lookup.
• Auto generated event function handlers (not something I used personally).
• Better code completion. Documentation displays when selecting an element within a list.
• Still no way to easily link up your embedded assets.  Have to manually write the path to asset; no drag&drop available, or path completion.
• Still can’t add ‘TODO’ or ‘FIXME’ tags to your code where they show up in the ‘tasks’ pane without a 3rd party plugin.
• Enhanced html templating.  However, I would of liked to see a way to easily edit it by showing which variables are available to add to the template, and a way to add new variables to the runtime configuration.
• Need better context menus depending on content.  For instance, I was working on an actionscript only project and when I wanted to add another class, it showed me under ‘new’ menu: mxml components, modules, etc.
• Better profiling, ability to run GC manually, but still need to see CPU utilization so we know which instances are problematic.
• Sets RSL by default.  This is good since the framework gets cached and means you don’t need to download it again next time.
• A theme editor would be nice, but I guess that’s what Flash Catalyst is here to do.
• Component states are now fixed and easy to use.  Does not mess up deferred instantiation in viewstacks.

I have to applaud Adobe with their new html generation.  They’re now using SWFObject to inject the swf into the html and if javascript isn’t enabled, it defaults back to the old way of doing it using ‘object’ tags.  The whole thing makes it w3c compliant.

Flash builder now helps you generate code when adding in event functions within mxml, but I think they went about the wrong way of doing it.  Who would want to use a function named ‘button1_clickHandler’?  I don’t think this would save time at all for real developers, instead how about generating the function name from what the developer is currently typing as the name for the handler in the event?  Would be much easier and more intuitive way of doing it.  Would save a buttload of time too.

Something that designers and developers can be happy about in Flex 4 is the new text layout engine.  This engine is quite robust and makes ‘html style’ text possible (text flows depending on what’s being displayed, like images).  It also has an easy way to create text columns, all of which are dynamic.  There changes don’t seem very complex, but it does make Flex a lot easier to work with lots of content.

Only one thing that I don’t particularly like about Flex 4 – the size.  In Flex 3m if you merged an empty application, the end swf file size was 276kb, with Flex 4 it is now 517kb.  It’s even larger if you use RSL, but at least that gets cached.  A small inconvenience for the amount of improvements to the framework.

All and all, Flex 4 is a definite leap towards the proper way of doing enterprise level interfaces and I can’t wait for all the components to switch to the Spark architecture.  Now, if only we can get Flash Builder to save us even more time, I’d be one happy developer.