So, what's coming in Flex 4?

Adobe have published some information on what’s up and coming in the future Flex 4 release (codenamed “Gumbo”).

Although caked in a fairly thick layer of mar-bollocks (marketing bollocks), there’s a load of interesting information in there.

For a start it looks like Adobe are going to try and move away from the default Flex skin that nearly every single app seems to be released with.  This is understandable, as currently it’s easy to spot a Flex app vs that of Silverlight, or POF (Plain Old Flash – just made that one up).  This will be achieved via some changes to the skinning architecture whilst maintaining backwards compatibility to Flex 3.

Other details are still to be released, but at the moment sit under the headings “Accelerated Development”, “Horizontal Platform Improvements” and “Broadening Horizons”

There’s very little there, but expect some form of code generation tool, possibly some form of frameworks integration (Cairngorm?), possible cross-runtime features (export to other runtimes potentially?) as well as a general spit and polish throughout.

Flex 4 has no dates yet, but as always you can keep up to date on the Adobe Open Source website.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 16 Apr 2008