Flex Article

New Features in Flex 2 Beta 2

On March 20, 2006, the Flex engineering team announced the availability of Flex 2 beta 2. Since the beta 1 release, the Flex engineering team fixed hundreds of bugs, added platform support, and enhanced the existing product features based on your feedback. We would like to say thank you for all your comments, suggestions, and bug reports. The Flex 2 product line is better because of your involvement.

Adobe Flex 2 is the second generation of the award-winning Flex rich Internet application (RIA) environment. The Flex 2 product line contains several important pieces for building professional-grade rich Internet applications, including the following:

• Adobe Flex 2 Software Development Kit (SDK): The Flex SDK includes the Flex 2 compiler and Flex 2 framework. The SDK is available for free for building and deploying RIAs with Flex.
• Adobe Flex Charting: The Flex Charting components provide advanced charting capabilities including multi-axis charts and sophisticated financial charts along with line, bar, and pie charts.
• Adobe Flex Builder 2: Flex Builder 2 is the Flex 2 IDE based on Eclipse that provides an enhanced development environment for building Flex 2 applications. Flex Builder delivers developer productivity capabilities like code hinting, code debugging, and a graphical Design view.
• Adobe Flex Data Services 2: Flex Data Services (formerly Flex Enterprise Services 2) provides the same RPC services available in Flex 1.5 (RemoteObject, proxied Web Services, and HTTP) with new data messaging capabilities to enable pub/sub messaging, collaboration, and data push—along with data management services to solve the unique performance, data synchronization, and data paging problems that data-rich rich Internet applications present.

If you are new to Flex 2, I recommend that you read Flex 2: Enabling the Next Generation of Rich Internet Applications by David Wadhwani, Vice President of Engineering at Adobe. Also see the tutorials in Adobe Labs and videos about Flex 2.

Summary of Updates from Beta 1 to Beta 2

The following sections highlight the changes from Flex 2 beta 1 to Flex 2 beta 2:

Data Binding Changes

Flex 2 beta 2 includes changes to data binding to include supporting property-level and class-level[Bindable] on getter and setters and allow you to make them bindable without having to manually write event-dispatching logic.

Initializing Inherited Properties Using the id Attribute

In Flex 1.0 and Flex 1.5, an id-attributed MXML element initialized an inherited property if one existed with name=id, rather than creating a new one. Before beta 2, a collision between an inherited property name and an MXML id caused an error. Flex 2 beta 2 reintroduces the ability to initialize inherited properties.

Events Changes

Flex 2 beta 2 includes modifications to the events that Flex triggers during the component instantiation lifecycle below:

• preinitialize
• initialize
• creationComplete

Constraint-Based Layout

The syntax for using constraint-based layout has changed to use styles instead of the constraints property.

Flash Player 9 Security Changes

Flex 2 beta 2 contains many security-related changes in Flash Player. The most affected changes are loading (including appDomain, loaderInfo, and loading events), Stage, Sound, and Bitmaps.

For complete details, see Beta 1 to Beta 2 Changes on Adobe Labs.

New Flex Developer Libraries Now Available

Along with the Flex 2 beta 2 product updates, we have released several developer utilities on Adobe Labs:

ActionScript 3.0 Developer Libraries

The ActionScript 3.0 Libraries provide a set of functionality for common ActionScript 3.0 programming tasks like MD5 hashing, JSON serialization, advanced string and date parsing, and more. There are also libraries that simplify interactivity with several popular web applications such as Flickr, Mappr, Odeo, and YouTube, as well as RSS and Atom feeds.

FlexUnit Testing Framework

FlexUnit is a unit-testing framework for Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications. It mimics the functionality of JUnit, a Java unit-testing framework, and comes with a graphical test runner.

Flex-Ajax Bridge

The Flex-Ajax Bridge (FABridge) allows you to complement and extend Ajax-style applications with rich content and Flex controls by making JavaScript to Flash communication easier. Once you've inserted the library, pretty much anything you can do using ActionScript, you can do in JavaScript.

ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity

Flex applications can leverage the easy data connectivity capabilities of ColdFusion. The ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity components include a new version of Flash Remoting that allows you to call CFC functions from a Flex application to provide simple access to all of the back-end services available from ColdFusion. It also adds a new ColdFusion Event Gateway type that you can use within a Flex application to specify a ColdFusion event gateway as a destination for messages. Similarly, your ColdFusion application can use an Event Gateway to send events to a Flex application.

Where to Go from Here

We are very excited and proud of what we're doing with the Flex 2 product line and would like you to get involved by downloading and installing Flex 2 beta 2. You can find more information about beta 2 and download the installer from the Flex 2 beta 2 page on Adobe Labs.

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