A while back Ely Greenfield did a session entitled Flex Roadmap, where he demonstrated some of his ideas on MVC architecture for component development. When I first saw the videos, my jaw hit the floor. Using nothing but a series of MXML tags, he skinned styled and changed the look and feel of a simple List component into an accordion and then into a weird quasi menu/drop down thing. Ever since then, i’ve been waiting with baited breath for the next version of flex, but then reading Juan Sanchez blog at scalenine.com I’ve come to realise a big portion of my workload will be done for me.
For me one of the fun parts of working with flex, is building custom components. I love working with the three main functions, createchildren, commitproperties and updatedisplaylist. I get real joy knowing that I’ve made the component as lightweight as possible. However, I know that these new tags are going to make the framework even more optimized, and open up flex to create much more beautiful itemrenderers.