subject: Develop Ria Using Adobe Flex 4.0 [print this page] Effects are the most readily visible aspect of a rich-client application. People like Smooth, Animated transitions, these features are not typically associated with HTML-based Web applications or we can say with traditional desktop applications. But rich-client user interfaces provide APIs to make such effects easy and natural to specify. These effects help to increase the usability of an application and help to engage a visitor more in the website.
Adobe Flex is a software development kit (SDK) based on Adobe Flash platform. Adobe Flex is used for the development and deployment of cross-platform Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The additional advantage of Adobe Flex is that it is open source framework and by using flex compiler and adobe Flash builder, developers can easily develop Rich Internet Applications. Adobe Flex developer can add video and audio clips to make it more interactive and eye-catching and through which the product manager can easily explain the product or service hosted on the site. Thus Flex development encourages better presentation of business information through rich graphical presentations, multimedia and animated displays.
The latest version of Adobe Flex is Flex 4.0, released on March 22, 2010. Flex 4 added an entirely new class hierarchy for effects that allows developers to make more sophisticated and extensible animations. Flex 4.0 can directly take advantage of new Flash Player-10 capabilities, such as 3D drawing and PixelBender.
The new Flex 4.0 is better than Flex 3.0 as it:
Provide a framework that support a new degree of expressiveness
Improve compiler performance
Easily enabled with tools
Productivity enhancements to language features like data binding
Framework Evolution: now Flex 4.0 can take advantage of new Flash Player capabilities
The biggest feature of component architecture is Spark. Spark provides a much more expressive mechanism for designers and developers to work together on the appearance of their Flex applications. Spark currently includes approximately 30 new components and primitives.
Now developers can efficiently produce fully functional RIAs, means RIAs with more features and less codes. So that the RIA can easily function properly and deliver better results even under stressful conditions, which is essential for any online business to stay ahead in the market.
