Adobe Flex 4.0 Released

Adobe released Flex 4.0 (code named Gumbo) on March 22nd 2010 . The Flex 4 development environment is called Adobe Flash Builder, formerly known as Adobe Flex Builder.

Some themes that have been mentioned by Adobe and have been incorporated into Flex 4 are as follows:

    * Design in Mind: The framework has been designed for continuous collaboration between designers and developers.
    * Accelerated Development: Be able to take application development from conception to reality quickly.
    * Horizontal Platform Improvements: Compiler performance, language enhancements, BiDi components, enhanced text (Flex 4 includes the new Text Layout Framework ).
    * Full Support for Adobe Flash Player 10 and above.
    * Broadening Horizons: Finding ways to make a framework lighter, supporting more deployment runtimes,  runtime MXML.
    * Simpler skinning than the previous versions.
    * Integration with Adobe Flash Catalyst.
    * Custom templates
 
What is Adobe Flex ?
 
As a web developer you've often found yourself wishing there was a way to make web applications that weren't limited to the heavy restrictions of HTML. You've used JavaScript to make your forms a little more intuitive with dynamic/context driven comboboxes, but to do anything more often requires heavy amounts of JavaScript and DHTML. Even if you are a pro at it, it's extremely time consuming to make workflow interactive and user friendly. More importantly, why would you want to be spending so much time on core UI functionality when you're getting paid to work on business logic and workflow.
Adobe/Macromedia Flex takes you to the next level of web application development with the concept of Rich Internet Applications (aka RIAs).

You may have seen applications developed natively in Flash itself and realized that it offers a much more robust experience for the user where productivity is bolstered by ease of use, streamlined workflow, and real time interactivity that is impossible to accomplish in HTML itself. However developing rich applications in Flash for those who are core developers is daunting and unintuitive. The Flash development tool is geared for designers, and developing on a timeline is a strange concept. Flex removes that barrier to entry by providing a programmatic way for developing these RIAs.
Rich Internet Applications
What is an RIA anyways? Well HTML applications are state-less. Application servers maintain state by using cookies and session variables to keep track of users, but all the logic is on the server. So while a user is looking at a page in their browser, the application is unable to do anything until the user commits an action that sends data from the page back to the server for processing. The code processes the data, and generates resulting HTML that the browser loads back in.

Presentation Links

Click Here to read cflex documentation on Adobe flex
Click Here for Wikipedia  Link about Flex
PPT about Adobe flex 2.0  Click Here to download
PPT about Adobe flex 3.0  and framework Click Here to download