By: Michael Boucher

Pretty exciting news out of Adobe. Flex 4 is beginning active development. I am really excited to see what the next round of solutions for the Flash Platform are going to be, especially after the MAX and FITC sneak peaks of Flash Player 10 "Astro" and Adobe "Thermo." Also with the new ECMAScript 4.0 proposal (ES4 Overview PDF)being targeted for this Fall, about the same time as Flex 4 BETA 1, it will be interesting to see if "Actionscript 4" makes its way into the mix. Only time will tell.

The below text has been copied from Adobe OpenSource Web Site

Flex 4, codenamed Gumbo, is now beginning active development. The product plan is not yet complete, but a few themes are under consideration:

• Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer. Probably involves an additional component model that integrates with the existing Halo components.
• Accelerated Development: take application development from concept to reality quickly. Features could include application templates, architectural framework integration, binding improvements.
• Horizontal Platform Improvements: features that benefit all application and user types. Features could include compiler performance, language enhancements, BiDi components, enhanced text.
• Broadening Horizons: expand the range of applications and use-cases that can leverage Flex. Features could include finding a way to make the framework lighter, supporting more deployment runtimes, runtime MXML.

Follow the Flex 4 planning process

Download builds of Flex 4 from here