Flex 4 BitmapImage

Flex 4, and specifically the new spark framework has a BitmapImage object in the spark.primitives package. It's associated mxml tag is . I found this after trying to add a Bitmap object to a VGroup only to get errors. So, after searching a bit, I found the BitmapImage and simply set the source property to my BitmapData. Very easy.

My code problem was to read a remote image then scale it to as close to a target width & height as possible without changing the original aspect ratio. From there, the user can rescale the image and drag a focus rectangle over the image to select the desired image section. Then, with the click of a button, the image is scaled and cropped to the optimum size. I used JPEGEncoder to write the data back out to a new image file.

Flex 4/Flash Builder Beta

Adobe released Flash 4 Beta 2 a few weeks ago with many changes and improvements over Flex 3. The new lightweight spark framework has many advantages over the older mx components and separates skinning in an attempt to facility and advocate better separation of concerns and improved maintainability.

There are also some significant improvements to the Flash Builder IDE that take much better advantage of the eclipse framework. It was always a big mystery to my why Flex 2 and 3 Builders seemed to strip so many of the basic features out of eclipse when they created their IDE. Many of those features, although not all, are now included.

One basic but vital feature is the ability to create your own standard templates for AS3 classes and MXML applications and components. The approach follows the eclipse use of internal variables, like ${user}, ${date}, ${year}, etc.

Another feature is conditional breakpoints and watchpoints. There is also a way to do remote debugging.

So it looks like the new Flash Builder comes closer to providing the basic eclipse functionality that has been missing since Flex 1.x was introduced. I'll post later with other features that have been included while I work my way through the latest Max 2009 presentations and the on-line "Flex 4 in a week" training series. And, in subsequent posts, I will share what is offered by the new Spark platform.