Chapter 5. Halo Flex 4: Using DataGrid, Navigator Containers, and Popups
Way back in Session 5 we discussed that there was a namepsace (library://ns.adobe.com/flex/halo) full of the old Halo components that were used in Flex 1 through Flex 3. I showed an example of an app built using only Halo components. It was simple, featuring containers like HBox and Panel and controls like List and Button. Since they’re in a different namespace, these Panel, List, and Button classes are different from the Spark ones. This separate namespace is a bit awkward at first but is far preferable to the original idea, which was to use a horrible Fx prefix on the new Spark components.
We left Halo at that point and we haven’t revisited it—until now. In this chapter we’ll take a tour of some of the Halo components that are still relevant to you as a Flex 4 developer. By still relevant, I mean that they either don’t have Spark equivalents or that they’re more functional in some important way than their current Spark equivalents. Although you can read a lot of articles about this topic, one masterful article stands out as far superior to the others: Joan Lafferty’s “Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 beta.”[1] Joan is the Flex SDK Quality Lead, and that article is not only authoritative but also extremely readable.