Technology Review
Based on Adobe's needs and the feature set, WorkflowLab was built using Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Builder 4, Flex 4.0, AIR 2.0, and the design tools in Creative Suite 5. Since all these products were in beta when this project started, the development team had little experience with the tool set. Because of this lack of knowledge, the team needed to spend a few days "ramping up" on the various tools and SDK changes that were going to be leveraged for the project. This was an important step, in order to ensure that the team had enough knowledge to make the right architecture decisions when planning the development.
For Flex 4.0, the most pressing hurdle to overcome was learning how to develop components with the new Spark component architecture. The paradigm of creating custom components was redefined in Flex 4, and the WorkflowLab development team had little experience with this new concept. Over a couple of days, the team researched the various specification and API documents that the Adobe Flex team had provided. The developers also took time to code a few examples to get their feet wet with the new features.