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Joan Lafferty

Joan Lafferty

butterfliesandbugs.wordpress.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Migrating applications to Flex 4 beta
  3. An overview of the Flex 4 beta architecture changes
  4. New components and containers
  5. Changes in effects
  6. Working with text
  7. Backwards compatibility With Flex 3
Created:
1 June 2009
Modified:
4 October 2009
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Flex 4

Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 beta (updated for beta 2)

The Flex 4 (codename: Gumbo) beta release is a major change from Flex 3. The Flex 4 beta introduces a new component and skinning architecture. As a Flex 3 developer, however, you will likely not encounter too many challenges when compiling Flex 3 applications with the Flex 4 beta, since a goal of the new release is to maintain backwards compatibility with Flex 3.

In this article, I will provide a general overview of the main objectives in the Flex 4 beta, architecture differences, and an introduction to changes in components, layouts, use of states, and effects. I'll also answer some questions regarding what to expect when you compile your Flex 3 application in Flex 4 beta. This article will not cover all of the new features and functionality in Flex 4. For that information, see Matt Chotin's What's new in Flex 4 beta (updated for Beta 2) article.

Throughout this document, the term MX components refers to components originally included in Flex 3. The term Spark components refers to the new set of components in the Flex 4 beta.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the

Flex 4 beta

Prerequisite knowledge

This article assumes knowledge of the Flex 3 Framework.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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About the author

Joan Lafferty is the Flex SDK Quality Lead. She has worked on the quality of the Flex framework for more than four years. Before Flex, Joan worked in Quality Engineering at Macromedia on the product Central. Joan has tested most of the Managers for the framework, itemRenderers, CSS capabilities, the Marshall Plan, and a number of the components and containers.