Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.

The folks developing JavaFX have taken the rather pragmatic approach of writing plug-ins to Adobe's CS3 products rather than create their own design tools ... does that neutralize one of Adobe's and Microsoft's most important competitive advantages?

Day 1 of 360Flex has come and gone. Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I was able to attend.

This excerpt from Learning Flex 3 is for InsideRIA readers who may be considering giving Flex a try and who need a get-up-to-speed tutorial on handling use input in Flex. It's written by Alaric Cole, who's contributed open source components to the Flex community and who is a development and consulting specialist at Yahoo!.

Part 2: Making Things Happen

This excerpt from Learning Flex 3 is for InsideRIA readers who may be considering giving Flex a try and who need a get-up-to-speed tutorial on handling use input in Flex. It's written by Alaric Cole, who's contributed open source components to the Flex community and who is a development and consulting specialist at Yahoo!.

Part 3: Debugging for Kicks and Summary

This excerpt from Learning Flex 3 is for InsideRIA readers who may be considering giving Flex a try and who need a get-up-to-speed tutorial on handling use input in Flex. It's written by Alaric Cole, who's contributed open source components to the Flex community and who is a development and consulting specialist at Yahoo!.

Earlier today, Richard Monson-Haefel posted here on insideria.com about the "One Million Record Challenge". I thought this was a pretty interesting test for any RIA platform, although it will yield wildly different results on different machines, and can't necessarily be used as a true benchmark. I decided to take on this challenge with Flex.

I've been involved in web development for about 12 years now and have always been involved in the early stages and client facing aspects of the development cycle. More often than not I turned to very low-fi methods of sketching the early versions of a UI such as paper, whiteboard or Powerpoint. None of these are ideal and the early agreed upon designs seem to get lost along the way. Also it's hard to make changes to non digital mockups.

Inevitably, the process of coding your Flex applications will sooner or later result in some bugs. As a continuation of our coverage of the Flex Builder I.D.E., we focus this time on the built-in debugger tool, and a few of its capabilities. Those new to Flex programming should take away from this a basic understanding of how to use debugging as a means to pinpoint any problems in their code.

When you choose a RIA platform you have to consider many things and in many cases Ajax, Flash/Flex, or Silverlight will do the job nicely. But there are occasions when you need something much more powerful and that’s when you should take a serious look at Curl.