One thing the Flex community has lacked up to this point is a robust, extensible, open source solution for creating MDI interfaces. Today that is changing as myself (Ben Clinkinbeard), Brian Holmes and Brendan Meutzner are excited to announce flexmdi. As the name and my introduction implies, flexmdi is a framework for easily creating MDI interfaces in Adobe Flex. While you can literally get up and running with flexmdi in a matter of seconds, our team focused heavily on allowing developers to easily extend and customize the framework to fit it to their specific needs.

The project has been constructed during nights and weekends over the past month or so since we all have day jobs, but the focus has always been on creating a framework that enables developers to be productive out of the gate while allowing powerful customizations by way of an intuitive and robust API. Some highlights include:

  • Draggable, resizable (from any edge/corner) windows
  • Default functionality for minimize, maximize/restore and close
  • Extensive event model on both a window and manager level
  • Externalized effects classes for transitions (allows developers to create their own or extend from our base implementations)
  • Cascade, tile and tile plus fill space window management
  • Context menu functionality
  • Ability to modify/customize default behaviors, not just override them (though you can do that too)
  • Construct UIs in MXML or AS

We have a few articles/tutorials put together already, and more are on the way. This is a pretty solid 1.0 release, but we will also be polishing and cleaning things between now and MAX, where we will be giving a short demo during the Flex Boot Camp session. Please send us your feedback! We are eager to hear from other developers about what is good, what is bad, what should be easier, what use cases you would like support for, etc, etc.

So now, onto the links:

Thats all for now, but expect ongoing updates and articles. And once again, got a complaint? Tell us! Like what you see? Tell us! Want to contribute (code, not money) to the project? Tell us!

Enjoy!

PS – Quick shout out to Wietse Veenstra. We used his stylesheet as a starting point and I believe are still using his images for the window controls buttons. Thanks!