It was great seeing everyone from the Flex user community at the Developer Summit this year. If you were unable to attend hopefully we can see you next year or at the User’s Conference this summer. We received many questions and comments, and wanted to share some of it with everyone.
What’s going on with Flex at Esri?
The Flex Team at Esri is growing and doing great. In the last few months we’ve added three new team members. For more information about Flex at Esri and Adobe, please read the following posts.
- Some thoughts on the direction of the ArcGIS web mapping APIs (JavaScript, Flex, and Silverlight) [Esri]
- Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future [Adobe]
- Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes [Adobe]
Mobile
I’m always surprised by the number of people that don’t know that you can use the Flex SDK and the ArcGIS API for Flex to build mobile applications for Blackberry, Android, and iOS devices. Several people came by with new iPads and showed us some great Flex apps. The interest in mobile was more popular than expected at this year’s conference, possibly due to the fact we showcased it in several Technical Workshops. Below is a basic example of the ArcGIS API for Flex running as a native application on an iPad 2.
You can download the Flash Builder Projects used to build this application from ArcGIS.com (2012 Developer Summit ArcGIS for Flex “Sharing code across platforms” Samples). Note: You will still need to download the ArcGIS API for Flex from the Resource Center.
Mobile resources
http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/flex/tourdeflex/web/
http://flex.org/flexgame/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air.html
Security
Many developers had questions about how to add security to their applications. For basic lockdown of applications, you can use basic web application security to lock down your directory. If you set up the security on your services, the IdentityManager will prompt as needed. You can also take advantage of ownership-based access control for more granular control when editing data.
What’s coming for ArcGIS API/Viewer 3.0 for Flex?
API
- Requirements: Adobe Flex 4.6 SDK / Flash Player 11.1 / AIR 3.2 (note that the 3.0 prerelease only required Adobe Flex 4.5 SDK / Flash Player 10.2)
- ArcGIS 10.1 functionality: PDF printing, editor tracking, dynamic layers and much more
- Pop-up windows displaying multiple features
- IdentityManager to log in to secure ArcGIS Servers
- Support for ArcGIS Portal API (not in Prerelease)
Viewer
- Application builder to easily create flex viewer applications
- Support for Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online hosted services, ArcGIS Server secure services and proxy servers
- Improved user experience in the application builder
- Custom widget support in the application builder (not in Prerelease)
New Resource Centers
Be sure to check out the new resource centers for ArcGIS API for Flex and ArcGIS Viewer for Flex, where you can download the 3.0 Prerelease Application Builder/Viewer, API & Samples and get more information on what’s new.
Final Thoughts
Whether you were able to attend the 2012 Esri Developer Summit or not, you can already find plenary and keynote sessions online. Soon slides from the pre-summit seminars, technical sessions, and user presentations will also be available.
–Contributed by Lloyd Heberlie from the ArcGIS for Flex development team
In regards to mobile capabilities, I was at a presentation where Mansour stated that offline editing and tile package support will be available in one of the next releases. Do you guys have a timeline for when offline editing capabilities will be supported in AIR applications?
Casey
No, there is no timeline for supporting offline editing and tile packages in the Flex API. However, you can already extend the API to use tile packages. Mansour wrote a blog article on Offline TPK viewer in a Flex Mobile Application that shows how.
hi Casey,
I’m having the same questions and searched around but nobody could really confirms that. Have you got the answer?
cheers,
Jack