As you may have heard, the next version of Flex is codenamed “Gumbo” and we are beginning to get out information on the kinds of things we’re thinking about. One of our themes is called “Design in Mind” and I have now posted information on the open source site to try to set the context for what we’re looking at. Over the next few weeks, engineers will be putting up specifications and blog postings about the kinds of things we’re looking at as part of this theme. More themes will get their intros over time as well.
Given that we’re only a few months into even thinking about this release, it may be the earliest that we’ve put out anything substantial on a release that admittedly is still a ways away.
Follow the Flex 4 development plans here. (Note: opensource.adobe.com will be down for maintenance on Saturday April 12, be forewarned).
Milestones
These milestones are very much a work in progress:
Milestone Date
Scope determined April 2008
Beta 1 Late 2008
4.0 Final 2009
Flex 4, codenamed Gumbo, is now beginning active development. The product plan is not yet complete, but a few themes are under consideration:
- Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer. Probably involves an additional component model that integrates with the existing Halo components.
- Accelerated Development: take application development from concept to reality quickly. Features could include application templates, architectural framework integration, binding improvements.
- Horizontal Platform Improvements: features that benefit all application and user types. Features could include compiler performance, language enhancements, BiDi components, enhanced text.
- Broadening Horizons: expand the range of applications and use-cases that can leverage Flex. Features could include finding a way to make the framework lighter, supporting more deployment runtimes, runtime MXML.
Follow the Flex 4 planning process (this is where you’d find specs)
Download builds of Flex 4 from here
