Developer/Designer and DCD features of Flash Builder 4

23Nov09

Flex applications can more often than not be divided into two broad categories:

1) Applications built around a very specific design

2) Applications built with data at the core

Flex 4 provides great new features which addresses both styles of application development. For the first set of applications, Flash builder 4 empowers the developers with a new Developer/Designer Workflow theme. For the second set of applications, Flash Builder 4 provides a new and exciting feature called Data Centric Development (DCD). DCD is a Rapid Application Development feature in Flash Builder 4 which is aimed to enable traditional web developers to quickly build Flex apps, which will connect to server side back ends like Cold Fusion, PHP, LCDS, BlazeDS, HTTPService and WebService.

I will not dwell into the intricacies of both the workflows in this post, as their already exist some amazing articles which completely cover the functionalities of the two features. The links to those articles are documented below,

Quick Links:

Developer/Designer Workflow theme:

1) Tutorials on Flash Catalyst and Flex 4

Data Centric Developement:

1) Introduction to DCD

2) Build a Master-Detail Flex-Cold Fusion application without writing a line of code

3) Building Flex and LCDS based CRUD application using Flash Builder 4

4) DCD Service Wizard – PHP service

5) DCD Service Wizard – HTTPService

6) Using WebServices with DCD

7) Building Flex and Java based CRUD application using Flash Builder 4