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Adobe has released Adobe Flex Component Kit for Adobe Flash CS3 to create Flex controls, containers, skins, Icons, Interactivities, and other assets in Flash CS3 Professional. Users can then import those assets into their Flex application. According to Flex Documentation Team the documentation that is currently shipping with Flex Builder does not contain the information on how to create Flex containers. However they have provided an article to provide documentation update.

Download the PDF: Importing Flash CS3 Assets into Flex

As a RIA developer we often encountered this situation where we need to choose in between Adobe Flash or Adobe Flex for a project. You have a large project with versatile requirements, lots of interactive elements to it and the target format is Shockwave Flash Format (SWF). Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex both are used in same paradigm with slight difference of usability. The approach to this would be to identify the nature of the project and demanded timeframe. (more…)

Salesforce.com and Adobe announced this week the Flex Toolkit for Apex(SalesForce SaaS app) which allows Flex-driven Flash applications to be integrated into Salesforce apps. is a great news for rich Internet application application developers and now their apps can deliver information through an on-demand enterprise platform.

Third-party Flex applications are packaged-up and served from the Salesforce servers and so no additional infrastructure is needed. The toolkit shares the same single sign-on as the a regular Salesforce app which makes the experience more seamless.

Salesforce also released documentation and guidelines for developers.

Hmmm this seems a great combination as recently salesforce tied up with Google Gears and now with flex to leverage the real essence of Web2.0.

his toolkit also supports the current alpha 1 release of Adobe’s Apollo.

Download the Flex toolkit for Apex

Adobe Flex Documentation team has released the missed out documentation for Flex charting  shipped with Flex 3.

Flex 3 charting documentation deals about:

Displaying Data and Labels
“Using data labels”
“Using per-item fills”
“Omitting days on a DateTimeAxis” (aka, work-week axis)

Download Charting Documentation

I don’t know how much you have faced this problem and were unable to figure out the way to do it. Today I had this problem and I found the solution and wanna share this with all of you. So here it is,

My problem was after uploading data to a server via Flex i.e. FileReference.upload,  there was no way to receive data back from the server in response to your upload. A common requirement. e.g. Upload a file for processing, server returns results (typically status).

Solution: Add a listener on your FileReference object: (Make sure you have flash player build version greater than 9.0.28). To check this right click on the Flash application opened in Bowser and choose about.

fileReference.addEventListener(DataEvent.UPLOAD_COMPLETE_DATA, responseHandler);

private function responseHandler( event:DataEvent ) :void
{
var response:XML = XML( event.data );
Alert.show(response.toString())
}

Have fun

Quick overview of using the Flex Component Kit

Flash content requirements

• Exported content must be a MovieClip symbol
• Registration point must be upper-left corner
• Frame rate should be 24 to match Flex’s default frame rate
• The symbol name should be a valid ActionScript class name (alphanumeric characters only, no spaces) (more…)

The Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 allows you to create interactive, animated content in Flash, and use it in Flex as a Flex component. This is prerelease software.

You can watch this presentation to learn more about the component kit. It includes the steps required to prepare your Flash content for Flex, and examples of various interaction possibilities…. (more…)

Flex 3 runtime-shared-libraries (RSLs) is a mechanism to reduce the size of your applications and thereby reduce the time required to download the application. Its not an architectural change whereas RSLs are just SWF files whose code is used as a shared library between different application SWF files.

An RSL is a stand-alone file that the client downloads separately from your application’s SWF file, and caches on the client computer for use with multiple application SWF files. Using an RSL reduces the resulting file size for your applications. The benefits increase as the number of applications that use the RSL increases. If you only have one application, putting components into RSLs does not reduce the aggregate download size, and may increase it.

Noticeable point is RSL’s are being shared across domain also. Please read further for details. There are two kinds of RSLs, Signed and Unsigned.

Signed RSLs are libraries that are signed by Adobe and may be stored in the Flash Player Cache, which can be accessed by applications from any domain. This means if your application is using a signed RSL, the RSL may not even need to be downloaded if the RSL is ready in the Flash Player Cache. The signed RSL may have been put into the Flash Player Cache by visiting another web site that was using the same signed RSL. Signed RSLs have a “sgn” extension.

Unsigned RSLs are normal SWF files and are not loaded into the Flash Player Cache. Instead, these RSLs rely on the browser’s cache to keep them from being downloaded. It may be a third party or your component to be shared across.

While working on one of my assignment I found an amazing link regarding RSL, please have a look Flex 3 RSLs