O’Reilly: Inside RIA

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.