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This quarter’s new Adobe Edge is now live on their site and DevelopmentArc has two features this release.  Aaron sat down and wrote up a great introduction to Flash Catalyst round-tripping called “Roundtripping between Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Creative Suite 4“.  He takes a look at how it works and a proposed workflow that designers and Catalyst users (maybe the same person, maybe not) can use to make iterative updates to the UI.

I (James) sat down and examined the new MXML Graphics and FXG formats in the article “Understanding FXG, a primer on Adobe’s new graphics file format“.  These are exciting additions to the Flash Platform allowing both easier to read design content and inter-interoperability between tools.  If you are a Flex developer who uses Degrafa, then the concepts of MXML Graphics are going to make a lot of sense.  Let us know what you all think!

For the last few projects, we have found ourselves creating more custom ActionScript based Flex components then MXML based components. One of the challenges with this kind of development in the Flex Framework is understanding where and when to handle component configuration. When should we set styles? How do we update children components? How can I improve performance and scalability of my application? Trying to define the best answers for these questions have been rolling around in our heads for a while, and we are not the only people asking them.

We felt that the best way to approach solving this issue was to first understand the Flex Framework lifecycle. The lifecyle provides four main stages: creation, growth, maturity and destruction. Adobe has talked about this since the launch Flex but not all developers are familiar with the actual process. Even if you are familiar with the lifecycle, understanding the intricacies and what is available to you as a developer is not well documented or easily digestible. We are seeing a movement of Flex experts researching the topic and trying to provide better insight into the overall process. At Flex|360, RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh did entire presentation on the subject. At Adobe MAX, there were multiple sessions that covered these concepts.

Yet, even with this kind of coverage, the topic is so broad and deep that many of these sessions have to skim over some of the more minuet details for brevity’s sake. Our own curiosity had been peaked and we decided to pull back the covers of the Flex SDK and take a look for ourselves. Over the last two months we have spent hundreds of hours working on a white-paper (research, discussion, writing and editing) that explores the Flex Component and Application lifecycle. We are proud to announce the release of new DevelopmentArc™ Article section and the white-paper “Understanding the Adobe Flex® 3 Component and Framework Lifecycle“.

This article is a living document, one that we hope to grow and expand over time. We are always looking for feedback and questions about the content of the article. As you read the document and you find yourself with a question or idea to improve upon let us know! We hope that reading this article is as enlightening to you as it was to us…

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Starting back in June of 2008, I became a regular contributor to the Adobe Edge Newsletter. My most recent article, “The Future of Flex Components” was just published in the February 2009 edition. In this article, I explore the upcoming Flex 4 (codename Gubmo) component architecture and how it will change Flex develop in the future. Understanding how the new components are designed is critical both from a developers perspective but also a designers perspective so that they can best apply their design in a functional and consistent manner within the technology.

In the same edition, our good friend Doug Winnie also has a new article. In “An iterative approach to the designer-developer workflow“, Doug discusses how designers and developer work using an iterative process and how this process can be applied to make a more cohesive team and product. Doug’s insights are always spot on and once again his detailed research into workflows is shown in this piece.