Gumbo Unveiled

If you check the Flex Open Source site often, you may have noticed that a lot of information regarding the next version of Flex, codename Gumbo, was published today. There’s a high-level presentation covering the Gumbo plan, a whitepaper covering the new tenets laid down by the Gumbo architecture, individual Gumbo feature specifications and most noteworthy: Gumbo source code (an approved build should be posted by 7/15 AM PST on the Gumbo builds page).

Check this information out, especially the source code. Comments for the whitepaper and feature specifications are enabled and we’re dying to hear your feedback. I’m pretty excited about where the Gumbo release is heading and how many problems we are solving with the new architecture. Things that were previously hard to implement in Halo like highly-customized item renderers and decoupling layout from individual components is many times simpler with Gumbo. Keep an eye on the Gumbo open source page to see more feature specifications added as active development continues.

Enjoy.

11 Replies to “Gumbo Unveiled”

  1. Hi Deepa,

    Any word if the data visualization packages (specifically the charts) are going to be re-written within the gumbo architecture? I think it would be immensely valuable if that were the case, as right now I think the charts epitomize the brittleness of the current Flex framework, and having charts that were “easily” extensible/styleable would go a long way to fostering more innovation on the data visualization side.

    – Tom

  2. We are definitely interested in getting as many components as possible updated to use the new model, but it will take a few releases to get there. The data visualization components are ones that will need to come in a subsequent release. We are of course interested in any help folks out in the community would be interested in providing to potentially get us there faster (though we acknowledge that the charts aren’t open source) 🙂

  3. @Chetan: Gumbo follows the same component lifecycle laid down in Halo, with additional methods to handle the new Gumbo skinning model. So, you can definitely leverage your existing Halo component knowledge when working in Gumbo. To learn more about the Gumbo component lifecycle, check out that section in the Gumbo component whitepaper.

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