July 16th 2008 | Jens C Brynildsen

Flex 4 SDK available

Want to be on the bleeding edge and don't mind Alpha versions? On the Adobe OpenSource site Matt Chotin details the plan for the next release of the Flex SDK (code named Gumbo) and you can already start playing with Flex 4 by downloading the public nightly builds.

Flex 3 has been a successful release for Adobe and they're not resting on their laurels. Flex 4 is codenamed Gumbo and it has three core "Themes":

Design in mind (easier skinning, improve on graphics capabilities, tool integration)
Developer Productivity (automation, compiler enhancements)
Framework Evolution (support for Flash Player 10 and AIR 2.0 features, new components)

The final version of Flex 4 and the Flex 4 SDK are planned for the second half of 2009. If you can't wait to play with the new version (and don't mind using buggy software), you can download an alpha version of the Flex 4 SDK today. The latest build was published Jul 15th.

The Flex 4 Framework will get three (core) additions:

A new namespace called "MXML 2009" will be created that will hold all the required code for integrating with other applications (such as Thermo).
"FXG" for basic graphics drawing.
There will be a new component and skinning architecture (also named "Gumbo" for now) that aims to offer more design friendly components as well as easier skinning.

To see an impressive example of how FXG and the component skinning can work together, make sure you watch this great video by Ely Greenfield. This really looks promising (but maybe somewhat demotivating for the Degrafa team that's put a lot of effort into providing similar functionality in Flex 3). To read more about the Gumbo component architecture, check this article by Deepa Subramaniam.

The size of the framework has been one of the big complaints with Flex. The team have considered building a lightweight version, but found this unfeasible for this release. A lightweight and scalable version of the framework is planned and may see the light some time in the first half of 2010. This version of the framework should be able work on devices and Adobe is currently building a team for this task.

Gumbo applications should be about the same size as Flex 3 apps, but some extra size will be added from the new features and components despite optimizations. In his presentation, Matt mentions that Flash Player 9 release 3 is now installed on more than 80% of all computers. This (and newer versions) allows the Flex Framework to be cached on the client computers, so that can help download performance a little while waiting for a lighter version. If you write your apps with this feature, that'll increase the download speed significantly.