Regarding state, the ’state of the app’ is still retained in the model, yes, like Steven said. The Flex 2 implementation of states are actually the View’s representation of those states. This is better in 2 ways.

First, the same thing existed in Flex 1.5 / 1. If I wanted to show an ‘error state’ for my Login component, I had to either code it to create controls / colors / animations manually, or use a ViewStack with extra bindings for the new components the ViewStack implemented.

States in Flex 2 allow the same thing, only more efficient in that it uses the new DisplayList. If a component is removed from the DL, it isn’t rendered, thus doesn’t take system resources. A lot of us old skool Flash Developers would just hide or mask out components which was extremely inefficient. ViewStacks work the exact same way.

Furthermore, the interface Flex 2 has for states is really nice. The ViewStack one in Flex 1.5 was ok, but it’s just a lot nicer in Flex Builder 2.

Finally, I don’t have to use copious, spaghetti ActionScript to code transitions like I had to in Flex 1.5. In 2, the states mesh really nicely with the transition tags.

Again, this has NOTHING to do with application state. My Login needs to visually support an error state as dictated by my designer. The actual state of the application however resides in the model, and IT tells the state of the Login when to change.

Make sense or no?

First was your statement that Flex apps all look the same. Adobe should take notice when people say this, because its one of the principal reasons (among many others) why Java failed as a front end. Its no longer ok for Adobe to do a Flash 7 style library with components that all look the same, and push the effort onto your customer base to actually do all of the customization. No matter how easy it is to customize their design, most programmers will simply slap in whatever component they need rather than coordinate with a designer to customize it. If Adobe really wants to differentiate Flex applications from each other, they need to create a simpler way to modify designs. And these components need extremely sexy animation capabilities built into them from the start. I don’t know how Adobe would pull that off, its just been my experience that the area of customization for components is something that wasn’t really taken advantage of in Flash. When they were customized it was usually just to change a color or a font rather than to add any real bling to them. You can see this in Flex apps now, the characteristic gray always seems to be present and people just really add in their own highlight or offset colors instead of creating a really sexy and unique look. Part of the problem is that programmers tend to drive the development of applications, which leaves designers scratching their heads as to how they should contribute. This is obviously less of a problem in traditional Flash websites, but as the need for technical functionality grows in a project the problem rears its ugly head.

The second topic of interest to me was the use of states and transitions. When I first read that Flex was going to support them I got so excited about what the potential was. Then I read Steven Webster’s article series about Cairngorm and something in that article struck me as being in contradiction with the way that Flex handles states. Steven’s article basically said that the model IS the state, and developers should resist the temptation to spread state around their application as a bunch of primitives or whatever. Instead you should bind your interface components to the model so that when backend logic updates the model, your UI automatically adjusts itself. This seems contradictory to Flex’s use of states as being explicitly defined in an mxml file (which naturally seems to want to find its way to the view and/or controller). I’d love to hear anyone else’s opinion on this as I’m still kind of mulling over how the two different styles would coexist, or if I’m interpreting Steven’s article incorrectly.

Great presentation, it confirmed what I had been thinking for quite a while about the combination of Flash and Flex.