Flex News Desk

Yesterday, a new component architecture and feature specifications were provided to the Flex SDK open source developer community. Flex team targets three primary teams:

Design in mind
MXML language is being adjusted to help the upcoming designer tools like Thermo automatically generate Flex applications. MXML namespace (ends with 2006) that points to the current MXML classes remains intact, but a new one (ends with 2009) will be introduced.

The new format FXJ allows you to describe vector graphics in XML, which will simplify the exchange between Thermo and Flex.

Gumbo is a new component and skinning architecture. The first release of Gumbo will introduce a number of new basic components such as Button and List, but the DataGrid component remains as it is now (the Halo component model).

Gumbo improves view states, effects and layouts. Reducing the size of the resulting SWF files is not planned.

Developer productivity
The biggest target here is compiler performance. The minor improvements are two-way bindings and CSS improvements.

Framework evolution
With Flash Player 10, the text representation will improve. The text becomes bidirectional (left to right and right to left), and it’ll support the multi-column layouts too.

Expect improvements in videos. The video component will become skinnable.

Adobe has another long-term initiative, separate from Gumbo, to create a lighter version of Flex framework that will produce the code for mobile devices. The first version of lightweight Flex should be released in 2010.

For more details on Gumbo, please visit  http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo