Download Flex 4 in a day

About This Document
While it is impossible to cover all the aspects of any nontrivial framework or language in
only 40 pages, we are confident that after reading this document you’ll manage to find
your way on Flex 4 projects. On the web there are many interesting articles on Flex and
there is extensive documentation on the Adobe website. This document is not intended
to duplicate that content. Instead, we have strived to keep it focused on what you need
to know, so you have enough information to get started and you know where to look for
more.
About the authors:
Mihai Corlan is a platform evangelist with Adobe Systems. For the past two years he’s
been traveling and speaking at conferences or partners and clients around the world. He
focuses on Flex, AIR, and Flex Builder. You can follow him on his blog http://corlan.org
or twitter http://twitter.com/mcorlan.
Alin Achim is a computer scientist with Adobe Systems. He is part of a team charged
with building software used by Adobe employees. Flex (combined with various server
side technologies) forms the backbone for the solutions they build.
Introduction
If you remember the transition from Flex 2 to Flex 3, you may recall that it was fairly
nice and easy to follow. Compared to that, Flex 4 is a revolution: some aspects of the
framework were changed and many new features were added.
The most notable new features are:
• A new UI component architecture named Spark that works along with the old one
(MX). The Spark architecture separates the skinning and layout from the data and
behavior.
• A new animation engine
• The addition of FXG and MXML graphics
• New MXML language features
• The addition of text controls based on the Text Layout Framework
• Charts, advanced data grid, and OLAP data grid are now part of the open source Flex
SDK
2