The Flex 3.2 SDK has just been released. This release includes many bug fixes, but also one major new feature: improved support for loading sub-applications. Not only can your main app load and interact with sub-apps that are both inside and outside of its security sandbox, but you can also load sub-apps that were compiled with different versions of the Flex compiler (known as multi-versioning).
A sub-application is any application SWF file that is loaded into a main application SWF file. You load sub-apps if you have a portal web site or a form manager or dashboard that uses content from other sites. Sub-apps are like modules in many ways, except they can be loaded locally or cross-domain.
You might not have control over the the source code, or even the version of the compiler, that is being used to compile that sub-app. When you load the sub-app, you get to choose what level of trust your main app will have with it. This is a very important consideration, because if you don't have complete control over the source of a sub-app, you should seriously consider loading that sub-app into a separate security sandbox, rather than loading it into the same security sandbox as the main application.
Of course, there are trade-offs. What the new functionality lets you do depends on the level of trust you have between the main application and the sub-application.
If you load a sub-app into the same sandbox as the main app, then you can have a greater level of data sharing and interaction between the two apps. In separate sandbxoes, the apps have less interoperability (but some is still possible).
To load sub-apps, you still use the SWFLoader control. For multi-versioning support, the class has a new property: loadForCompatibility. Set this property to true to indicate that the sub-application might be compiled with a different version of the compiler.
You can get all the links to info about the Flex 3.2 release here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/sdk32_fb302.html
The documentation for the loading sub-applications feature is here:
http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_flex_loading_applications_en
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