No doubt by now you’ve heard, probably even downloaded & played with Flash Builder 4.  This is the new version of Flex, but Adobe decided to change the name to Flash Builder to avoid confusion with the open source version of the Flex SDK (or maybe to create confusion?!).

There’s increasing amounts of information and demos about Flash Builder 4 on the web and a good number of tutorials and videos from Adobe themselves.

A few of the interesting things for me right now are:

Data connectivity features

They’ve added loads of tools and wizards to aid in connecting to server data sources.  You can quickly and easily connect to a web service or remoting endpoint and Flash Builder will automatically figure out the methods, objects and parameters required for successful communication.  It will also support paging large data sets (you just create one method for retrieving a subset of info and another method for retrieving the overall count) and the spark components will automatically retrieve data from those methods when necessary, for example scrolling through a large list in a List control.

It will even automatically hook up edit/delete operations, again as long as you provide the methods on the server to do so.

Right now I haven’t figured out how to hook it up to FluorineFX and I don’t know if I’ll even use it as I use Mate extensively for data communications, but it’s exciting nonetheless.

MXML component skinning

The new Spark components all support MXML skin classes.  Basically you create an MXML class based off the Skin component, add in your states (eg up, down, selected, disabled for a Button) and skin away using native drawing types (Rect etc) to your heart’s content.  I’m still playing a bit with this so it’ll take a while to unlock all the magic that can be used here.

Project Themes

Flash Builder will let you change the entire theme of your application at design time just by selecting it from a list.  You can also download and create new themes.  Whilst themes for Flash Builder 4 are scarce right now, I see this as turning into a huge library of free and commercial themes you can use for your apps, reducing design time to a minimum.

Network Monitor

Firebug for Firefox is superb, don’t get me wrong.  But the major feature it lacks that I would love to see is the ability to view AMF data.  Flash Builder 4 has a network monitor that does just this – it’ll show all server calls made as well as the data that is sent to and received from the server.  This should make debugging a whole lot easier.

Unit Testing

Whilst not new to Flex or any developer, integration of FlexUnit into Flash Builder 4 will be a welcome addition for many.

As I play more with Flash Builder I’ll post some examples and tutorials here for all to see.