Tag Archives: gumbo

AdobeTV: New Flex Builder “Gumbo” Features

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My latest Tech Talk with Ryan Stewart video is up and in this one I chat with Scott Evans about some of the new features in Flex Builder “Gumbo”, how you can get features into the product, and then show a quick demo of some of the new stuff. We did this round of videos the day after MAX, so they’re definitely not the best demos I’ve ever done, and this one is pretty simple, but the best part (as always) is the interview with Scott. If you missed it, I’ve also got one on Alchemy in which I interviewed Scott Petersen.

Deepa And Peter Flynn Talking about Gumbo and Catalyst Tomorrow

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If you want to hear about Catalyst from the horse’s mouth and you’re in the bay area then you should swing by the Bay Area Application Developers Adobe User Group. Peter Flynn, an engineer on the Catalyst team, is going to talk about Catalyst and he’ll be joined by the venerable Deepa Subramaniam talking about Gumbo. Plus she’s giving away a copy of her book, so there are free goodies!

Downloading and Updating the Flex 4 SDK Using SVN

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There’s a good writeup for getting started with and using SVN to download the Flex 4 source code, so if you’re a beginner, that’s a great place to start. If you’re a heavy user of SVN, then the below is going to be useless. But if you’re semi-new to SVN and hoping to get started quickly with the Flex 4 source code, I hope this makes it as easy as possible by limiting the number of steps.

Currently I’ve got an SDKs folder on my computer where I store various SDKs for use. To check out the source code, open up the Terminal and use the following steps in whichever directory you want to store your Flex 4 SDK:

mkdir flex_4
cd flex_4

We’ve got the latest Flex 4 SDK inside of the trunk folder of the main Flex 4 open source repository, so that’s all we want to check out. Note the ‘.’ at the end of the command, that’s just going to make sure we put this in the folder we’re currently in:

svn co http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk .

That may take a little while. Once that’s done you’re ready to roll. Now if you want to keep that build up to date, you just need to go into that flex_4 directory and use one little command:

svn up

That trunk folder in Open Source is constantly being updated with the latest Flex 4 checkins, so it can change often. Once you’ve got your brand new Flex 4 SDK downloaded you can start using it in Flex Builder by adding multiple SDKs using these instructions.

New Prefixes for Flex 4 Components

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As a couple people have noticed, the nightlies of Flex 4 include some changes to the component names. Instead of <Button> we’ve now got <FxButton>. I asked Matt what was up and he gave me some info. If you’ve been looking at the Flex 4 stuff at all you know that what we’ve done is create new “Gumbonents” that have the same name as old components. Up until now we’ve been relying on different packages to keep them clear. So you used to see <mx:Button> and <Button> side by side and those belonged to different packages. With Flex 4 you can interchange the new “Gumbonents” and the old Halo components so we needed to support both models. It became pretty clear that packages alone weren’t going to cut it.

There are a couple of benefits to using prefixes over just packages. One is the ability to merge Halo and Gumbo components into one namespace, the 2009 namespace. This makes it easier to upgrade as we create new Gumbo components or update Halo components. It also means we don’t need to add namespace support for CSS which should save a lot of headaches.

In general this should make everything a lot easier. Tooling/code completion will make more sense, upgrading will be easier, and transitioning over to the Gumbonents will be easier as well. It may take some getting used to writing <FxApplication> instead of <mx:Application> but in the long run I think it makes more sense.