Deepa Subramaniam
The Alpha 2 drop of FlexBuilder for Linux has just been posted on Adobe Labs! I was floored by what the team showed off at MAX, and am equally impressed with what the team has been able to get done for this latest build. You can see whats newly been added to this engineering drop here as well as check out those FlexBuilder features that are, as of yet, unsupported.
Linux lovers, hop to it!
New in Flex 3 is the vaguely named, but oh-so cool Advanced Constraints feature. Constraints was originally an SDK feature built atop the existing Flex 2 constraint-based layout system. Remember that in Flex 2 you could use the constraint styles (left/right/top/bottom/verticalCenter/horizontalCenter) to constrain controls to the edges of their parent container’s border. You could use constraint-based layout in any container that supported absolute positioning, like Canvas, Panel and Application. For Flex 3, the Advanced Constraints feature introduces the concept of ConstraintColumn and ConstraintRow objects that can be used to partition up absolute positioning containers. We broadened the constraint syntax to allow for controls to be constrained to these columns and rows and using this mechanism you can do really cool things like sibling relative constraints and better re-flowing layouts. This functionality is still in the Flex 3 SDK and you can definitely hand code these layouts relatively easily. The FlexBuilder 3 code editor gives code hints and code editing help for the new Advanced Constraints syntax out of the box. Check out the documentation, feature writeup and sample code on labs for more in-depth examples of syntax and usage and how to leverage Advanced Constraints in your layouts.
Continue reading “Where did the FlexBuilder Advanced Constraints UI go?”
In case you’ve been living under a rock with no MXNA access, the final beta of Flex 3 SDK and FlexBuilder 3 was released on Adobe Labs last night along with AIR Beta 3. These releases are quite mature, having really focused on the final bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements needed before we ship. Download the bits, give the builds some love, and file all issues in our public bugbase.
Additional exciting news was the announcement that Adobe is releasing the source code for its remoting and messaging technologies (AMF) under a new open source product called BlazeDS. This is huge news as it allows developers to easily build RIA’s with real time data by using a completely free and open source based technology.
Bravo to the Flex, FlexBuilder, AIR and Data Services team! Continue reading “Big releases for Flex, FlexBuilder and AIR”