Gumbo:Whats New
From Adobe Labs
What’s New in the Flex Gumbo MAX Preview
Gumbo, the next generation of Flex Builder, delivers a long list of new features and improvements to existing features in three main themes; designer/developer workflow, IDE productivity , and data-centric application development.
The designer/developer theme is all about empowering better collaboration between developers using Gumbo and users of Adobe’s leading creative tools, with emphasis on two key products in the Flash platform; Flash Professional, and Flash Catalyst. For Flash Professional, Gumbo features a new workflow for adding Flash content to a Flex application: simply drag out the “New Flash Component” or “New Flash Container” item from the components panel and place it somewhere on their design canvas. You can launch Flash Professional and create or edit the content and click “done” to return to Gumbo with the FLA and SWC file exported to the Gumbo project.
Flash Catalyst is a new product from Adobe that makes it easy for designers to create RIA UIs from artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools. The applications created in Catalyst are Flex applications - and Gumbo provides a simple roundtrip workflow for importing and exporting these projects allowing designers to collaborate with developers more easily than ever before.
Once you’ve imported an application from Catalyst, or built one from scratch, Gumbo delivers a long list of new and improved features to make your data-to-day coding and testing more productive. Refactoring, debugging, and the profiler from Flex Builder 3 have been improved with some of the most requested enhancements. The debugger adds conditional breakpoints, watchpoints, run to line, and an expression evaluator. Profiler now includes an improved "Object References" report. And move refactoring has been added. Watch for even more improvements in these areas in future Gumbo releases, too. For new IDE productivity features, try getter/setter generation, event code generation, the new Package Explorer, and support for ASDoc tooltips. Gumbo also supports creating custom file templates for MXML, ActionScript, and CSS.
Beyond coding productivity, Gumbo adds two important new features for testing applications; network monitor, and Flex Unit support. The network monitor allows you to see the network traffic between the Flash client and your backend server from within Gumbo itself. This enables you to more easily debug data access portions of the Flex application, and to diagnose any performance issues that might exist between the client and server. Unit testing is another important part of the application development process and Gumbo makes it easy with Flex Unit support. This will allow test setup, test file creation, test running and test result analysis in Gumbo.
The final theme is all about data-centric application development. While many Flex applications are built with elaborate design for public facing consumer sites, many more are data intensive business applications for use within corporate firewalls – data dashboards, forms processing, content management, and so on. These kinds of applications typically employ logic on the back end written in a scripting language like PHP or ColdFusion, or .NET or Java, or web services. Prior to Gumbo, it was sometimes challenging for developers to connect to these different back-end systems and manage the data within a Flex application. But a brand new approach to using data in Flex will change all that.
The new Client Data Management (CDM) feature super-simplifies how you work with data on the server. Using the new Services Explorer in Gumbo, you can now bind UI components in your application to operations on the server. CDM then manages a CDM data store bound to this operation, allowing on-demand fetching of data for easy and efficient scrolling through large collections of data, change tracking allowing users to “un-do” actions, and automation of the common CRUD (create, read, update, & delete) functions that usually need to be hand-coded. Creating, updating, and deleting data is done within the CDM data store so that when you’re ready to update the back end system, a single call to the client data management’s commit() method handles synchronizing all of the changes for you. It all works against multiple server types (like ColdFusion, PHP, as well as SOAP and XML over HTTP – and in future releases an even more powerful and comprehensive experience will be available for developers using Adobe® LiveCycle® Data Services ES) and produces straightforward Actionscript interfaces that you can use yourself, or simply let the tool do the work for you.
The Gumbo MAX Preview is an important step in the development of the future of Flex Builder, but it is just a preview. Many of these features are still under development and there are other new features that we’re planning for upcoming preview releases. But we did want to give you a look into where we’re taking the product, and we’d love to hear what you think. Please use the forums to ask questions and discuss the features in this release, report bugs or feature requests in the bugbase, review the release notes, and keep watching for other releases in the near future.
Go back to the Gumbo MAX preview page >
