I’ve heard that the components in the upcoming Flex 4 framework will be more loosely coupled possibly allowing for smaller filesizes for projects that use relatively few components. It this true? Or will the entire Flex framework still get bundled into each SWF that uses a single Flex 4 component?
If it is true, and we could compile fairly small SWFs, what sort of SWF filesize could we expect for a very minimal Flex 4 app? By minimal I mean a VBox with some text in it and a Scroll Bar.
EDIT:
Ok, my bad, need to do more research before posting such a question in the future: Flex 4 is built on top of the Flex 3 architecture, so SWFs will still need to bundle the Flex framework (or use RSL to separate the Framework bytecode from the application bytecode – as mentioned below).
see:
I am not aware of any changes planned for Flex 4 regarding swf size (and a quick google search didn’t turn up anything), but that being said, Flex 3 had some changes to reduce the size of swfs:
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/06/flex-3-thursday-dramatically-smaller.php
It allows the swf to not contain the framework and if the framework is needed it is downloaded to the client and cached. So your swf sizes depend only on the size of your actual code. We have swf sizes very small, as small as 200kb. Do you have a particular project that is producing a swf larger than you expect?