Using Flex Builder 3 with the Flex 4 SDK

At Flex 360, someone asked me where they could find out how to use our Flex 4 SDKs with Flex Builder 3 because Builder 4
isn’t available to the public. This is pretty easy thanks to the multiple SDK support in Builder. So, as promised to a customer,
here are the instructions for using Flex Builder 3 with the Flex 4 Gumbo SDK.

1) Download the Gumbo SDK – Go to opensource.adobe.com.

2) Unzip the flex_sdk_4.zip to some location on your hard drive. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll download it to
C:/Flex4/trunk/7069

3) Open up Flex Builder 3 and create a new Flex project.

4) Right-click on the project and select the ‘Properties’ option. This should open the Properties panel.

5) From the left hand menu, select ‘Flex Compiler’ to view the Flex Compiler properties

6) In the Flex Compiler properties view, click on the link ‘Configure Flex SDKs…’
ConfigureSDK

7) You should be in the ‘Installed Flex SDKs’ view. click on the button ‘Add’.

8) In the resulting dialog, browse to the location that you installed the SDK (from step #2). Then, click ‘OK’.

addSDK

The Flex 4 Gumbo SDK should now be added to the list of SDKs available for you to use for this project.

9) Press ‘OK’ in the “Installed Flex SDKs” dialog bringing you back to the main ‘Flex Compiler’ properties
dialog.

10) In the ‘Flex Compiler’ dialog, select the radio button for ‘Use a specific SDK’ and
select the Flex 4 SDK that you added.

11) In the ‘Flex Compiler’ dialog, for ‘Require Flash Player version:’, enter 10.0.0. Flex 4
will only support Flash Player 10 content. If you compile to player 9, you will get an error.

requiredVersion

12) Press ‘OK’ to close your dialog.

13) Note that when you create new mxml files for this project, the default tags will still be the tag
with the old namespace. You will need to manually change the mxml to use our new Spark Application tag and the new namespaces.

To get started with your first spark application. Feel free to use the sample below which is a simple spark application using the
3 new namespaces and some spark components (s:) along with halo components (mx:).

Note: If you try to compile a Flex 3 application with Flex 4, be aware of some of the migration issues that you’ll face that I mentioned
in a previous post.

Have fun playing with Spark!

Download Sample Spark App:  firstSample4App.mxml

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

~ by jlafferty on May 21, 2009.

Posted in Flex Builder, Gumbo Samples
Tags: , ,

7 Responses to “Using Flex Builder 3 with the Flex 4 SDK”

  1. Where is the sample application? I’m having namespace troubles.

    Tyler Chesley said this on May 24, 2009 at 8:58 pm | Reply

  2. Thank you so much, while I had already discovered a similar example with the above namespacing. I had spent hours trying to get simple “Hello World!” to work as almost all the examples were old Summer 2008/Winter 2009 examples.

    :-)

    nugun said this on May 28, 2009 at 8:04 pm | Reply

  3. I done same setup in my flex 3 builder for flex 4 sdk but i m not able to view my controls and components in design view can anyone help out how to use controls in design view with flex 4 sdk configured.

    Pravin said this on June 23, 2009 at 7:02 am | Reply

    • @Pravin: hmm.. I’m thinking there isn’t support for Design View for Flex 4 components with Flex Builder 3. (just my guess). Maybe someone else out there can help…

      jlafferty said this on June 24, 2009 at 12:54 am | Reply

  4. Thanks jlafferty for the reply,
    i will find out some other alternate for this but thanks a lot for providing such a nice tutorial.

    Thanks

    Pravin said this on June 25, 2009 at 4:55 am | Reply

  5. Al done . When I run the app. I get ‘ This file cannot be launched error.’

    jake said this on September 1, 2009 at 1:54 pm | Reply

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