The Official Flex Team Blog

Recently, folks have been having trouble downloading Flex SDKs. We apologize for any inconvenience. Unfortunately, an interesting set of circumstances have arisen that we are scrambling to work around. If you want to know more, read on, but if you just need to grab an SDK, please try the SWF in the following link.

Download a Flex SDK

Here are the details:
1) Flex had a site on opensource.adobe.com. That site was using a version of wiki software that was prone to attack.
2) Adobe plans to host all of its open source projects at Open@Adobe
3) Flex SDKs aren’t completely “open”. They have Adobe licensed files in the downloads.

We had some contractors migrate the opensource.adobe.com site to Open@Adobe so we could shut down opensource.adobe.com. I tested out the download links but didn’t notice they still used a page on opensource.adobe.com. Then, a few weeks ago, we shutdown opensource.adobe.com and suddenly, you couldn’t download a Flex SDK.

When we went to migrate that page to Open@Adobe we found that the page was “interactive”. It had a checkbox that you had to click on in order to enable the download button. It turns out that the wiki on Open@Adobe does not allow that kind of interactivity for security reasons. We explored various ways of trying to replicate that click-thru license on Open@Adobe but were unsuccessful, and our legal advisors required us to keep that click-thru interface to make sure you understand the rules around what you are downloading.

It also turned out that trying to host the click-thru page on some other Adobe server was fraught with process and other difficulties. There would have to be security audits, chains of approvals, etc, and meanwhile folks would still not be able to download SDKs. So, I’ve hacked together this SWF for you to use for now.

So that’s why we are where we are. The Flex pages at Open@Adobe will point to this same SWF. Some folks have posted direct links to the Adobe downloads server as a workaround, but that bypasses the licensing requirement. It is best if you can use the SWF.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience. It is an interesting intersection of security and open-ness. This blog and opensource.adobe.com are hosted by Adobe which strictly limits who can create interactive content. Open@Adobe is hosted at SourceForge which is a lot less restrictive and who can create content so they have tighter rules on what that content can do.

I am pleased to announce that Flex as been accepted into the Apache Incubator. With weekends and holidays, I suspect that it will still be several days before we get up and running with mailing lists, bug base, source control, etc, so we continue to appreciate your patience. However, I’m really looking forward to 2012 and beyond, and I hope you are too.

-Alex

We received a whopping 65 requests to be on the initial committers list for the proposal to become a Podling in the Apache Incubator! It is great to see such enthusiasm from the community.

We are discussing with Apache experts as to how many folks we can put on the list. I think it will be at least 24. Initial committers also form the Podling’s Project Management Committee and can vote in other committers who establish a track record by submitting patches that get accepted. I am not looking forward to having to deny so many of these requests. Once we pick a number, I will send each of you an email of whether your request was accepted or denied.

If you requested to be a committer and are not chosen to be on the initial list, please continue to show your support by contributing patches via the JIRA bug base that will be set up. That way you can be promoted to committer as soon as possible.

Thank you to all who requested to be a committer. I look forward to working with you on Flex.

-Alex

One of the requirements for a proposal to incubate a new project in the Apache Software Foundation is to have an initial set of committers. A committer has to sign a license agreement with Apache in order to obtain write access to the source code repository. A committer’s responsibilities are listed at http://www.apache.org/dev/committers.html#committer-responsibilities.

As we announced at the Flex Community Summit earlier this week, we are looking to identify the initial committers for the Flex SDK incubation proposal. If you want to be on this list of initial committers, please email me at aharui@adobe.com by noon PST Friday, December 16, 2011. We may limit the initial set to around 12, but you can still become a committer after that by following the process outlined by Apache. And remember, if you don’t want to be a committer, you can still contribute in many ways.

We are excited to be engaging the community in the shaping of Flex, and look forward to your future contributions.

Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.

At Adobe MAX last year we made public previews available of upcoming Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst releases . Since then we’ve continued to work on new features, as well as improve performance, fix bugs and respond to feedback received.

In addition to the public preview release, we also have a private pre-release program running that delivers updated builds to participants. We’re now ready to open that program up to some more people, so if you’re interested in trying out newer builds of Flex SDK, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst and are prepared to invest time providing our engineering teams with feedback, please complete the pre-release program survey.

Access to the pre-release will require you to agree to a non-disclosure agreement.

Thanks,

Andrew Shorten, Group Product Manager, Developer Tools
Deepa Subramaniam, Senior Product Manager, Flex SDK

Some of you may have noticed that Adobe Open Source has been down for some time. The service is currently unavailable as we investigate a critical issue with our server infrastructure. We currently do not have an ETA on restoring service, but I will share more information as it becomes available. I sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

Thank you for your patience,

Deepa Subramaniam

Senior Product Manager, Flex SDK

UPDATE: Service to opensource.adobe.com was reinstated Friday, 10/22 at 5 PM PST.

Several months ago, we announced that the next version of Flex, codenamed “Hero”, will contain new features for developing mobile applications. At MAX, we’ll be highlighting these new features in a number of sessions.

However, we know that you might want to go further and actually try it out for yourself. So we’re also hosting a “Bring Your Own Laptop” (BYOL) lab, Build Your First Mobile Flex Application, where you can actually get hands-on with the new mobile development features and tooling workflows. Also, if you bring an Android 2.2 phone (and the USB cable to connect it to your laptop), you can even install and run the application on your device.

The Monday 10/25 5 pm session is full, but there’s still room in the Wednesday 10/27 1:30 pm and 4 pm sessions. So, if you’re interested, sign up on the MAX website, and we’ll see you there!

I am pleased to announce that we have made the first build of Flex SDK “Hero” available today on the Adobe Open Source site.

The “Hero” release development practices have changed somewhat from the Flex 4 release – the biggest change is that “Hero” is built atop the latest (and as of yet, unreleased) Flash Player and AIR runtimes. Because of this tight coupling, we have been unable to provide nightly builds that showcase in-development Flash Player and AIR features. Once the current in-development Flash Player and AIR runtimes are showcased in a public release, nightly builds will resume. In the interim, we are releasing semi-regular stable builds that showcase “Hero” feature work not dependent on features under development in the latest Flash Player and AIR runtimes – the first of these builds has now been posted!

This build showcases in-development work like the Spark DataGrid (Tier 1), Spark Image, Spark Form, enhancements to RSLs, OSMF 1.0 integration and the SWF Size Report compiler option. Please download the build and play with the features and provide us feedback through JIRA.

Next, we are also announcing our first “Hero” Open Source Iteration meeting! This meeting is a gathering of the product team and the Flex community where we share work that has been completed in past iterations as well as discuss whats in store for upcoming iterations. The first meeting will be on October 1, 2010. You can find more details here.

And lastly, a collection of new “Hero” feature specifications have been posted! This includes:

• Spark DataGrid (Tier 1)
• Spark Formatters
• SWF Size Report
  

We are eager for feedback through commenting on feature specifications and filing bugs in JIRA.

Thanks,

Deepa Subramaniam, Flex SDK Product Manager
(Posted by Andrew on behalf of Deepa due to connectivity issues).

It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the next release of the Flex SDK, code-named Hero. The Hero release has three main themes:

• Multi-Screen Development: Allow developers to build applications that target the web, desktop or mobile devices using a single unified framework.
• Spark Maturation: Polish and grow the Spark architecture by adding new Spark components and capabilities.
• Large-Application Development: Support developers building large applications by improving fundamental Flex infrastructure pieces.

What’s even more exciting is that these three themes are being satisfied by taking advantage of new features in the next generation Flash Player and AIR runtimes. As those runtimes become publicly available, you will be able to download Hero builds and exercise in-development Hero features in order to learn and provide feedback.

Let’s dive into more detail for each of these themes.

Multi-Screen Development

We are currently building new mobile development capabilities into the Flex framework. The Hero release of Flex will enable developers to continue to create application experiences that translate well across platforms, in addition to making it easy to build applications that work well on a wide variety of mobile devices. Hero will augment a number of existing Flex components with mobile- and touch-optimized skins and functionality and will also add new components that support mobile-specific UI patterns. Developers already familiar with core Flex concepts like data binding, MXML and dynamic layout will be able to quickly leverage that knowledge into building applications that can target numerous mobile devices.

Previously, we had investigated splitting off mobile development into a separate, new branch of the Flex framework, code-named Slider. However, the rapid increases in performance on smartphone-class devices over the past year, combined with the highly optimized performance of Adobe runtimes on these devices, now make it feasible to support mobile use cases directly with the core Flex framework. This unification of both mobile- and desktop-targeted features into a single framework is one of the cornerstones of the Hero release.

You can learn much more about the mobile features targeted for the Hero release by reading the Flex and Mobile Whitepaper and the Flex and Mobile FAQ, as well as perusing Hero Mobile feature specifications on the new Hero open source site.

Spark Maturation

With the Flex 4 release, we introduced a new component and skinning architecture called Spark which allows for designers and developers to separate component logic from behavior and declaratively customize the visuals of a component. Spark has proven to be a key addition to the Flex framework, and the Hero release focuses on building more Spark-based components as well as providing new Spark capabilities to existing Flex features. Some of the new Spark components being offered in the Hero release include Spark Form, Spark Image and Spark DataGrid controls. These new Spark components not only provide parity with the previous MX versions, but also expose capabilities that allow for more modern component designs.

Large-Application Development

As people use Flex to build much more complex and mature applications, core pieces of the Flex framework must be retrofitted in order to support these efforts. The Hero release aims to improve the compilation experience (with regards to full and incremental compilation times as well as memory consumed during compilation) for large applications that make heavy use of modules or themes. Additionally, the support for linking runtime shared libraries has been enhanced to allow for smaller download size and faster startup time. You can read more information about the changes to RSL linkage by reading the Hero feature specification here.

Changes to Build Availability

More so then ever before, the Flex SDK is tied directly to the evolution of Flash Player and AIR. The Hero release is being built atop the latest, in-development (and as of yet un-released) Flash Player and AIR runtimes. Because of this tight coupling, we are unable to provide nightly builds that showcase in-development Flash Player and AIR features. Once the current in-development Flash Player and AIR runtimes are showcased in a public release, Hero nightly builds will resume. In the interim, we will release semi-regular builds that showcase Hero features not dependent on features under development in the latest Flash Player and AIR runtimes. We will be posting the first of such builds over the next coming days. These special builds will feature several of the items mentioned in the Spark Maturation and Large-Application Development themes above. Builds showcasing Hero mobile capabilities will follow in later months. Watch the Hero open source site for more information.

More Information

This is just the start of many documents outlining new features in the Hero release. Keep an eye on the Hero open source site for the sharing of whitepapers, special Hero builds, feature specifications and design documents. Additionally, we will soon be announcing our first Hero Open Iteration Meeting, where work completed in past iterations is reviewed and upcoming feature work is previewed. Also, you can find out more about AIR for Android and participate in the pre-release program by going here. We hope you are just as excited as we are with all of the new applications and workflows Hero will enable you to build!

Sincerely,
Flex SDK Product Team

Now that Flex 4 is out the door, don’t be fooled into thinking the Flex SDK team is resting on their laurels! We are planning a followup release to Flex 4 which should come out in the first half of 2010. This release will include support for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 as well as contain some new feature work and critical bugfixes.

The feature I’m most excited about is the new “layout mirroring” feature. This feature allows developers to mirror their layouts for right-to-left locales. The intent of this feature is to trivialize repurposing a Flex UI designed for a left-to-right language (like English or French) for a right-to-left language (like Hebrew or Arabic).

To support layout mirroring, some new APIs have been added. The two most important are layoutDirection (defined by the new interface mx.core.ILayoutDirectionElement) that is settable on any UIComponent, GraphicElement, SpriteVisualElement or UIMovieClip. [Note: on UIComponent, layoutDirection is a style and for GraphicElement, SpriteVisualElement and UIMovieClip, layoutDirection is implemented as a property].

The new layoutDirection property can be set to “ltr”, “rtl”, or null. When set to “rtl”, a mirroring transform is applied to mirror the layout. This mirroring transform is implemented atop the advanced layout features that was introduced in Flex 4.

What about text? First off, applications that depend on layout mirroring need to use FTE text which supports bi-directionality. If you have a Spark based application or component, FTE is used by default. If you intend to mirror a Flex 3 application, you need to enable FTE text in order to have bi-directional text. Once the text in your application is FTE-based, all you need to do is turn “on” bi-directionality by setting direction=”rtl” on the text components (this style inherits, so you can simply set it at the top-level and it will percolate down). This will ensure the default embedding level of all text blocks in your application is right-to-left.

There are definitely some parts of your application you will want to hand-tweak as the UI gets mirrored. However, in order to get your feet wet, I’d suggest taking the application you want to mirror and setting layoutDirection=”rtl” and direction=”rtl” on the top-level container of your application. This will percolate down through the display list and mirror according to the default Flex implementation.

So, what does this all mean? Well, on Tuesday, 3/31/10 the layout mirroring feature signed off! This is a huge accomplishment for the SDK Dev and QA teams as this feature required a lot of coordination across multiple engineers on the team (as well as input from our globalization teams and external customers). I encourage people to use the multi-SDK feature in Flash Builder 4 to download a build containing the newly landed layout mirroring feature, and give it a try. The best build to download would be 4.1.0.15132 or any build posted after that changelist. To learn more about the layout mirroring feature, please read the specification and if you find issues, file them in JIRA.