- The Flex 4 SDK requires Flash Player 10 support.
- Adobe® Flex® 4 introduces many features including a new skinning and component architecture, a new animations engine, an extended layout mechanism, a new text engine, and a new graphics library.
Flex 4 contains several major features added to the Flex architecture:
- The biggest change to Flex 4 is the introduction of a new skinning and component architecture called Spark.
- The Spark component architecture has several goals:
- Define a clean separation between the functional logic of the component and its appearance. Spark components consists of two classes to support the separation of logic and appearance: an ActionScript class that defines a component's logic and an MXML skin class that defines its visual appearance. To change the component's logic, subclass the component class and add your own behavior. To change the component's appearance but not its logic, customize the skin. Flex 4 has also simplified the process of skinning a component. Instead of defining skins in ActionScript, the Spark architecture lets you define skins in MXML.
Create a small set of basic components that are easily customized by developers.
Spark containers use a swappable layout algorithm that lets you select the layout from a set of predefined layouts. Or, you can define your own custom layout without creating an entire custom container.
Implement the Spark components on the same base classes as the components in the previous versions of Flex.
The new Spark component architecture is based on existing Flex classes, such as mx.core.UIComponent and mx.effects.Effect. Developers upgrading from previous versions of Flex are already familiar with these base classes, which makes the upgrade process simple. This means that you can mix components built with prior versions of Flex with the new Spark components in the same application.
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