How to convert an existing Flex 3.0 or older application to Run on Mobile

Mobile web standards evolution (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Below are the steps for Converting an existing Flex 3.0 or an older application to Run on mobile:

1. Create a mobile project
2. Add the MX.swc to the library path of your mobile project. 
3. Copy the code to this mobile project. Now, you would be able to use the MX Libraries in your mobile project.  
4. Test the performance on the mobile device, if it is not acceptable or very slow.  
   
1. Start replacing the MX components with Spark components until performance is acceptable in Step 4. 
5. In case you feel, the application is not very usable in small mobile screen, 
1. try re-designing & re-implementing your application using only mobile supported components.
2. You may consider reuse of some of your existing code to same effort & time. If very little reuse is possible you may consider evaluating development using other frameworks (for eg. Titanium, PhoneGap or HTML 5)

In case of any further queries or suggestions please post them as comment to this blog.

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Adobe Flex is now Apache Flex

Adobe has submitted the code for Flex framework along with number of other related components (including Testing Framework, BlazeDS, Falcon compiler) to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) so that it could be managed as an independent project.

The Flex project proposal has been accepted by Apache Software Foundation.

For further details please refer Adobe's official blog: http://blog.everythingflex.com/2011/11/16/apache-flex-update-from-adobe/. However,  Adobe might continue to dedicate its employees full time for further development of the Flex.

Discussions related to this recent announcements regarding Flex and the Flash Platform.



Incubator proposal of Flex could be found at the link below:
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/FlexProposal

Earlier Adobe also announced that it would not develop Flash Player for new mobile devices following the Flash Player 11.1 release for Android and BlackBerry Playbook, and would instead focus on tooling for HTML5, which will eventually provide similar functionality as that of Flash without requiring a separate plug-in.

Adobe will however continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. More details about this could be found at this blog http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/11/flash-to-focus-on-pc-browsing-and-mobile-apps-adobe-to-more-aggressively-contribute-to-html5.html

New Features in Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4.5 (codenamed "Burrito")

Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4.5 includes the following new features:

• new cross platform development features
• enhancements to Flash Builder and 
• support for the Adobe Flex® 4.5 SDK (codenamed "Hero").

Key themes for Flash Builder 4.5 includes the following:

• Developing mobile applications
• Developing multi-screen applications
• Accelerated coding
• Improved designer/developer workflow
• Updated platform support
• Better performance.

You user Flash Builder to perform the following activities while developing Web and Mobile applications.

• write code in source mode
• layout the UI
• style and application 
• implement an skin 
• apply a theme

A video on Building your First Mobile Application in Adobe Flash Builder.

mx.core.Application

To access properties and methods of the top-level Application object from anywhere in your application, you can use the application property of the Application class.

• use parentDocument property to define an DataGrid that is slightly smaller than the Application container .
• If you set the width and height properties of the child components MXML tags to percentage values, your components can also resize as your application resizes