O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Even though stateful skins are simple to understand, they are not well documented and there are a few quirks both of stateful skins and of how some of the components work that meant that the concept is easier said than done. So maybe by joining me on my journey you can benefit from the simplicity and power without hitting all of the headaches. Instead of a full-blown tutorial, I thought I'd share a few concepts about how I approached the problem of creating a stateful skin and what I learned in the process.

I'm as excited as anyone about the prospect of Flash Catalyst, but I recently discovered that skinning in Flex 3 is down right easy. When I first was learning Flex, I had Studio 8, so I managed to completely overlook...

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

Picking up where my last post about Spark skins left off, this post will show you how to add transitions to the skin of our previously created button.

One of the new features in Flex 4 is Spark skins. The spark.skins package is part of the Spark namespace and, as noted in Adobe's Flex 4 LiveDocs, "Custom Spark skins are MXML files that define the logic, graphic elements, and other objects that make up a skin for a Spark component." So what does that mean to you? I hope to get you started in learning the answer to that question in this post.